Pros
Remote First Company // Decent Pay // Unlimited PTO (Companies do this so they don't have to pay out unused PTO if you end up leaving) // Solid benefits
Cons
Turing has conducted two significant layoffs in 2022. The first one was on August 25th and the other on November 30th. This is quite surprising given that an announcement was made at the end of 2021 that they booked an $87M investment, which subsequently gave them a $1.1B valuation. (See TechCrunch) How is it possible that less than a year after you book $87M you're making two layoffs? Shareholders/Investors must be livid. On August 25th the CEO announced the first wave of layoffs, which was very unexpected for the entire organization given that Turing was supposedly cash heavy. In that announcement, Jonathan S. (CEO) assured employees twice that there would be "no additional reduction in headcount." That statement was complete b.s. Who is responsible for making multiple egregious hiring errors? Fast forward to November 30th, another unexpected layoff occurred ... 95 days after the first layoff. Layoff decisions don't happen overnight so how soon after the first layoff announcement was made that they were discussing another wave? Something else that is worth noting is that the CEO and various leadership told the employees, who were not laid off, that if they have any contact with those that were laid off that they should contact various leaders at Turing. Turing wants to keep things "hush hush" because the whole goal is to IPO and you can't have a successful IPO when laying people off becomes public. The Turing platform is extremely questionable. The platform boasts that it vets candidates to a "silicon valley standard" but many of these candidates can't even make it past the first interview because of a lack of technical or soft skills. It's true that there are customers leveraging the platform to build their technology teams, but the platform functions more as a database for candidates vs. an innovative solution that bridges supply and demand. For decades traditional staffing companies have been using databases to find known candidates. Turing functions as a global staffing company that happens to have a pretty database that decision makers have access to, but under the hood/behind closed doors its pure chaos. To date, the platform can only "vet" for engineers and it's doubtful how good this vetting process truly is. Turing recently announced a "Teams" offering, which is an empty promise to prospective companies that they can spin up cross functional teams to deliver on projects. The platform has zero vetting engine for PMs, QA, DMs, UX, etc. If a company asks for candidates that are not engineers Turing will say they can provide those candidates via our platform, but under the hood they need to go recruit for those roles, vet those candidates, and/or go into the database to find a candidate who might have those skills. There are so many other things I can touch on, but I wanted to shed light on a few key issues so future candidates and customers can make an informed decision on whether or not Turing is the kind of company they want to align themselves to.
