Hm where to begin…
1) The “CTO” is not a CTO. He is a nice guy, but “leads” the development team with very little vision or desire to grow/expand. He’s afraid of open source software/libraries (at least he was when I was there). The bare minimum seems to be a perfectly acceptable status quo. If you just want to write boring jquery/css as a job and make a severely subpar salary, this might be the company for you.
2) Benefits are horrible. I honestly have no clue what other people are talking about when they say the benefits are good. Salaried employees are treated like hourly/part-time employees where if you miss even just a half hour of work for, say a doctor appointment, you’re expected to make it up after work. You get basically no PTO, and it doesn’t carry over. Use it or lose it (i.e. the company no longer holds that liability on their balance sheets thanks to you not taking PTO, so really YOU are the one losing out on money since PTO is built into your salary).
3) You’re treated like a child. This relates back to having to make up missed work too. You have to ask your boss for permission to do anything. You’ll get in trouble if you take too long of a break. Overall, management tries to force us into being “responsible” by over-managing instead of just trusting that we as adults can be responsible employees all on our own.
4) as previously mentioned, the status quo is the peek of tech, but tech is claimed to be one of the core components of the business model - this is a company that tries to prioritize tech, even though beyond a silly under-performant ugly website, has nothing to do with software or tech. When I was there, it was even still hosted on bare-metal without load balancing, auto scaling, etc. I tried pushing for introducing machine learning/ai to simplify warehouse processes, AWS for cloud migration and hosting, etc with little to no interest. Like the title of this review says, stay as far away as possible from this company if you’re at all interested in being a software engineer/developer and actually learning anything.
5) It’s unnecessarily a “business casual” workplace. This honestly isn’t that big of a deal at the end of the day. Just another thing on the list of reasons why this company sucks to work at if you’re in the tech industry.
Keep in mind, I’m now comparing this to my experiences at a real tech company in the social media/live streaming space where software and innovation is the forefront of what we do. Like I said, if you’re cool just writing some basic JavaScript and html/css without any frameworks or anything, and don’t care about learning anything (and possibly actually want to become a worse developer) this could be the place for you.
