Pros
There is a well-stocked kitchen and an office manager that goes above and beyond to buy people their favorite candy and chips. The take what you need PTO policy is great. Some managers really care about their teams. The talent team does a great job bringing in smart, interesting people.
Cons
At Zapproved, everything is on fire all the time. At times, it can feel exciting to put a fire out and feel like you’re making a big impact, but the flip side is feeling burned out and realizing that these crises are completely self-made by the people running the company. The leadership team is seemingly unable to plan anything, and changes direction every few months. They overcompensate for their disorganization by sharing plans and prototypes too early in the development cycle and committing to unrealistic delivery dates for big, exciting new things. Everyone gets thrown into crisis-mode trying to meet these commitments, and when it becomes clear that they can’t deliver, the knives come out to determine who is going to take the fall. Some managers shield their teams from this, while others willfully throw people under the bus. Whether or not Zapproved is a good place to work mostly depends on how insulated you are from upper management. At the end of all that, Zappoved delivers some half-baked software and/or a ton of weak excuses for why they didn’t live up to their promises. To smooth over the damage, leadership will dangle some shiny new thing they can’t deliver on, and the fire starts again. Enormous amounts of time and resources are wasted on feeding this cycle. It drags the culture down and makes working at Zapproved much more stressful and toxic than it needs to be.
