Like if stepping on a lego was a startup company
Pros
• Open office environment with a good view of the mountains. • Opportunity to meet some talented and hardworking people.
Cons
• The management team was made up of young individuals with limited professional experience. This resulted in generally poor management with considerable turmoil between the company’s team leaders. Team leaders consistently displayed immature behaviors and were often held to a different standard than other employees. One individual in particular was allowed to consistently berate and disrespect other employees because of an overinflated sense of status within the company and their personal relationship with the CEO. This individual created conflict with multiple employees but the issue was ignored by HR and the CEO. • Data Analyst job title was very misleading. The work was not true analytics and the job itself was not fulfilling or beneficial in any way. I did not learn any valuable technical skills and I was not presented with any legitimate opportunities to grow within the company. The company’s actual in-house software was mediocre at best and did not live up to the expectations that were established in my interview. • There was a massive elephant in the room regarding the company's claims of how products were created. Major smoke-and-mirror situation in my opinion. The team of analysts completed extremely manual work to produce deliverables. I never witnessed anything that even slightly resembled the level of Natural Language Processing or Artificial Intelligence that the company claimed to have. In general, the CEO and management team were far more concerned with appearing like a legitimate software company instead of working to truly be one. This issue was made even more evident by the company’s website which was (and still is) full of convoluted language and vague descriptions of what the company does. All fluff and buzzwords, no substance. The CEO also handed out Director titles to employees in associate-level positions to feign an actual corporate structure. I would not describe Turbine Labs as a data analytics company or a software company. I would describe it as a PR company that provides social media reporting. Anyone interested in legitimate analytics should look elsewhere. • Culture was unsuspectingly toxic. Team leaders and HR were initially welcoming and friendly but this was only maintained if employees were complacent about the poor working environment within the company. Management had absolutely no respect for employees’ personal lives and employees were constantly expected to work overtime with insufficient compensation. The positions were salaried and employees’ time was easily abused as a result. When I said no to working on a weekend because of prior plans, HR badgered me relentlessly until I agreed to come into the office on a Saturday morning. It reached a point where the team of analysts was lucky to have a single weekend that was not spent working. I raised legitimate concerns about these issues and was met with defensive excuses from team leaders and HR alike. The go-to response was to make employees feel guilty for not being a “team player” as if having a personal life outside of work was a bad thing. The CEO, management, and HR used this notion to gaslight employees and single people out for not sacrificing all of their time and energy for the job. HR played a big part in driving this sentiment and did nothing to support or even acknowledge my concerns as an employee. This behavior also explained the company’s strategy of hiring young college graduates with no prior experience and little concept of what a job should and shouldn’t be. I strongly advise recent grads to avoid this company at all costs. • Extremely underpaid for the level of stress and expectations of overtime. Management created an internal certification process that provided a small salary increase when completed. However, the certification process was poorly monitored and included arbitrary requirements that analysts were expected to navigate on their own with little to no guidance from management. Many analysts were considered “senior” simply because all other analysts above them had already quit. The certification itself was purely internal and would never be relevant or useful to other companies. Employees were also made to believe that the company’s stock options would result in a significant payout but nothing about the products or software justified this claim. The “generosity” of providing stock options was just used as another excuse to treat employees poorly and abuse their time. • HR solicited online reviews from employees in exchange for free gift cards. HR was generally ineffective and unreliable with obvious bias that favored the company’s management team. • The CEO treated servers and other waitstaff very poorly during 1-on-1 work lunches. This was a major red flag that highlighted how the CEO treated those he viewed as “lower-status” or subordinate.
