TouchTunes reviews

2.9

43% would recommend to a friend

(129 total reviews)
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Ross Honey

32% approve of CEO

27% positive business outlook

TouchTunes has an employee rating of 2.9 out of 5 stars, based on 129 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The TouchTunes employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Media & Communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

129 reviews
4.0
Aug 1, 2019

Music is the Answer!

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Environment, Work-life Balance, Music Everywhere!

Cons

It's "start-up" like...but this could also be a pro! Lots of transformation.

3.0
May 2, 2018

Half and half

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Cutting edge tech stack. - Solid core product. - They experiment with bleeding edge tech: AI tools, big data and others. - Amazing people. Friendly, funny and smart. - Their IT group might eventually become a world-class team in my opinion - Good health insurance. It offers 100% coverage in most cases. - Fantastic work/life balance. - They like to build everything themselves. The exercise is fun and enriching, that’s why I’m listing it as something positive but sometimes it feels like they are reinventing the wheel. - Solid business and development processes that keep evolving. - I witnessed how upper management evolved from not having any idea on what they wanted to laying out a plan that they now present to the entire company during the first trimester as yearly objectives. It took a while but they have learned the value of communicating rather than being absolutely absent and obscure. - Awesome coffee machine. - Demo Fridays with beer & snacks.

Cons

- Some of their core products are built on top of outdated and painful-to-learn technologies like Google Web Toolkit. - I worked for TouchTunes for several years and I know it very well so I can responsibly say this: it is monstrously cheap. - Training is kept to the minimum per employee even though they brag a lot about “investing in ourselves”. - Even the RSP contribution “match” is abysmally miserable. - They never, not ever, give 100% of the promised bonus to the employees. The bonus is supposed to be tied to the employee’s yearly performance review but it isn’t in reality. They just keep making excuses in order to not pay what they should. - Once I got a yearly bonus of $500 (yes, 500) and I had a 4/5 in my performance review that year. - Like most IT companies in town, TouchTunes falls into the pitfall of giving new hires a competitive salary while forgetting about the more senior employees. By doing this they don’t realize (or maybe they do and they don’t do anything about it) that doing so is disrespectful and unfair to the people that have built the tools that sustain the current revenue. So don’t expect to build a long-lasting career there. You will probably have to leave after 2-3 years unless you are ready to accept being grotesquely underpaid. - One more thing about the prior, management has absolutely no problem lying about your current salary. They will, in private, repeat one time after another that what they’re paying you is competitive with the market. - Because the core product is solid things don’t move very fast. Everyone kind of chills a lot and nothing gets done in time. But eventually some work gets done. - Managers don’t really follow up on development plans. They’ll just lay some plan out to get rid of you and they’ll forget about it. - I disagree with the other review regarding promotions. At least when it comes to the tech group, they don’t promote even if it makes perfect sense. They’ll rather hire new people with a lot of experience instead of giving others the chance to step up. - Worst performance review process I’ve seen in my almost two decades old career: - The format of the review keeps changing year after year. - It isn’t based on personal achievements/goals. - Easily biased in many different ways since it is all based about opinions instead of results. - Will easily contain negative observations which you will hear about for the first time in your life when the review is handed over to you. - No free parking. Hard to park around the office. - No chicks. - If you are going to work in the Montreal office and you only speak English do yourself a favour: avoid the office manager at all costs. - As the result of a merger there are two CEOs. Doesn’t make any sense. There’s one of them that’s just some sort of accountant.

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TouchTunes Response
8y
Thanks for your feedback. While you had some concerns about your time with TouchTunes, I appreciate you laying out a lot of great positives, like our experimenting with bleeding edge tech and your appreciation for the all hands in February laying out the plan for the year. With regards to the areas that you believe we could improve, I am going to focus on compensation, both base salary, and bonus, as that is super important. First, let’s talk about the base salary. Like many companies, we use market surveys to determine the appropriate base compensation. Our goal is to be competitive, and we have made a lot of adjustments in the last 24 months to achieve that. In our March 2018 anonymous employee survey, only 12.5% of employees in our Montreal office felt that they weren’t compensated fairly vs. the market and industry. Overall, I feel good about that, although there is still work to do and that is why I encourage all employees who have a concern about their compensation to approach their manager to discuss it. On bonus payouts, our plan is based on the company hitting its EBITDA goals and employee performance. For FY2017, which ended in December 2017, the company met its targets, and the bonus pool was funded 100%. Every employee that met or exceeded their objectives for the year, of which there was a large number, received 100% or more of their target bonus. I also want to bring up a topic that you didn’t mention explicitly, but is very important to us: Diversity. We know a diverse team is a stronger team and we want people from different countries, cultures, genders and ethnicities to feel welcome at TouchTunes. If I am may offer you some feedback, while you may not have intended it, some of the language you used in your review fell short of that bar. To wrap it up, I am very proud of our Montreal team, both in the great work they do and the work environment they have. In that recent employee poll I mentioned, 92% of our Montreal team would recommend working at TouchTunes to friends and family, which is awesome!
1.0
Feb 9, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Most of the employees and lower level management are good people.

Cons

- Inadequate compensation. - Excessive pressure. - Nepotism. - The leadership team attempts to foster competition among employees. - A disengaged leadership team and top-down management. - The leadership is resistant to criticism and retaliates by, for instance, denying promotions, or being set up to fail and fired. - The leadership consistently making unrealistic promises to investors, disregarding feedback from developers who highlight the impracticality, results in setting unattainable expectations. Subsequently, blame is placed on developers for failing to meet deadlines. - The leadership has a short-term vision, thereby overlooking the quality of the code produced by developers. They encourage developers to minimize comments on pull requests and prioritize swift merging. - Imposed the RTO against the wishes of everyone, adversely affecting employees' quality of life. - In January, they laid off 4% of employees for economic reasons, yet Shortly thereafter, they acquired a company that sells darts in bars. - Employees are expected to work overtime without compensation, fostering a crunch culture similar to that seen in video game companies.

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TouchTunes Response
2y
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. As you know, I very much value feedback as both an opportunity for growth and a communication tool that helps us see how people might view issues in different ways. 2024 is a big year for TouchTunes. We are achieving some of the big dreams that we’ve had for years, which is both exciting and challenging. We’re about to release a brand-new app, we purchased North America’s largest darts business, and we’re spending a lot of time as a company envisioning what the future might hold. Those opportunities, and the growth that comes with them for the company and for each of us personally, can come with a lot of pressure, not to mention some difficult decisions (such as our decision to eliminate a very small number of roles earlier this year, even while we added roles elsewhere, or our decision to ask employees to return to the office on a hybrid basis to help foster the relationships and collaboration that are so important to our values and culture). I hope that you’ll discuss your concerns with our CTO in Montreal, with our HR team, or even with me personally. We want to understand your thoughts on how we might do things differently, even as we continue to grow. Thanks, Ross
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Glassdoor has 135 TouchTunes reviews submitted anonymously by TouchTunes employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if TouchTunes is right for you.