Start-up with great culture - Recensione dipendente - Marketing Executive presso Appear Networks

Let's start with the positives because with everything bad there is something good. Past and present, Appear has (had) a relative wealth of technical and sales technical talent. Many have jumped ship, but some people who would be immensely successful under better management still remain with the company. Exactly why they still stick around is hard to understand. Especially in light of the following (see Cons below).

Just recently, Appear came out with a press release boasting about being featured on a Swedish startup website. The claim highlights how poorly the company is really doing: After nearly 15 years of business, Appear still views itself a startup. And with so much talent, the management team holds sole blame. The company management team lacks any training for their respective positions and so "gut feeling" and personal biases rule in place of competence, practical skills and know-how. Thus at Appear, company objectives and goals have changed with every quarter, leaving both employees, customer and market, in a state of confusion. In the end and even though it’s in the eleventh hour, there is still potential at Appear. Replacing the Management, Marketing and parts of the Sales team and injecting substantial capital into the business could make the company blossom and grow beyond a permanent infancy stage. Perhaps the most sober strategy however, would be to offer Appear's shell chocked developers, sales, and sales technical staff, a new beginning somewhere else...

Technical proficiency is really valued at Appear, you get to work with colleagues who value clean code, and my time there made me a lot better programmer. The management was very understanding with my professional wishes and feedback. It was a real constructive discussion throughout the 3 years I worked there. I am now trying to be a better professional thanks to what I've learned working at Appear, both on the technology level and human level. Technically, the work is challenging, because the product is complex. So if you're looking for software challenges related to enterprise mobile apps, you won't be disappointed! I've contributed in building some mobile apps whose UX I'm really proud of, and this is not a given when your clients are the transport industry. Positive atmosphere there, I really felt that there was a synergy between the team members, although I've had my share of tough days (like in most jobs), due to the complexity of development. After my time at Appear, I didn't go for a position in yet another software company, because I knew it would be hard to top this.

I thing the challenge when working at Appear is not due to the company itself, but the business sector. When your business is making tools to ease mobile app development, you compete with super strong players like Google (AngularJS, Firebase...). So it can be difficult to work in the context of a very competitive business sector where it's difficult to win customers.