One of the premier dataviz studios in the world - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso Periscopic

I had an excellent job working at Periscopic as a junior developer. While there, I learned a huge amount about software development and launched my career, all while working on a wide range of interesting projects covering important subjects. The work I did there was really meaningful, and I was given important responsibilities as part of the team. The group is intelligent, friendly, and experienced. The company values and culture are great, and the work they do has a strong set of ethics behind it. For any person at any stage of their career, I think joining Periscopic would be a good choice.

I worked at Periscopic for just short of two years, and my experience there was overwhelmingly positive. I can't think of any cons worth mentioning.

Do Good with Data must be the best tagline of all time. The idea that data visualization can be crafted as a social good rather than a corporate metric is way overdue. More companies need to do this. Employees are smart, creative, cooperative, and nice.

Management is dysfunctional and disorganized. Employees are given conflicting directions and goals are changed without warning. The 'Do Good With Data' is just the shiny veneer - employees are as likely to be grinding away at some corporate visualization drudgery as they are to be saving the polar bears. My personal experience as a designer was one of constant frustration. I was kept completely siloed from the customer, consistently told that the customer liked my work, then told that it wasn't good enough or just plain wrong. My supervisor alternated between telling me to design my way and telling me to design according to the process of the employee i was replacing. My task was to design a user interface for a visualization the DataVis team hadn't even started on yet, and when i suggested it would be easier to make a good design if i knew what i was designing for, i was treated as if i was intentionally being uncooperative. Ultimately, i was fired without warning (my boss didn't even do it themselves, but instead had the other partner handle it), though the final design of the product is based entirely on my 'unsatisfactory' work. I know that the company went through at least two more designers in the 18 months after i left, which suggests some sort of systemic problem in the UI department.