Dysfunctional culture, mediocre tech and declining business - don't come here - Recensione dipendente - Product Management presso TrueCar

- Company is being made irrelevant by competitors run by smarter people with a better product; TrueCar is getting by as a fairly well-paying employer of almost last resort that happens to be located in Santa Monica and survives by having a few old partnerships with companies that clearly don't need TrueCar. From a product standpoint, most of your time will be spent doing silly things for these partner companies, or pointless things for TrueCar's lousy stand-alone platform. And you will have completely inadequate resources to do these things, with completely unfocused requests, while the company can't decide if they want to make car buyers or car dealers happy. - Fairly long hours spent inefficiently on collectively low-quality work; poor work-life balance considering how unimportant and low-impact TrueCar is in both e-commerce and in auto retailing. Kind of a culture of seeing who can stay in the office the longest while actually doing nothing important or innovative. Worse places, sure, but few combine mediocrity with these hours. - A really laughable core product that looks like an e-commerce suite from 2005 and has remained virtually unchanged for years, despite noisy initiatives to take us to 2010 e-commerce levels without the resources to do so. - Second-tier, immature "tech bros" and older, confused AutoTrader.com veterans make for uniquely awful leadership and internal experience. A weird combination of totally inadequate leaders who cannot run anything important mixed with people who should be selling cars at dealerships (and a weird amount of people who previously did second-tier finance or accounting jobs now in important operational and product positions). No wonder there is a different leader of HR almost every quarter as it would have been hard to design a worse combination of collective leadership if you tried. Also, feel free to mix in a minority or female in a real leadership role on occasion, its not the 1950s anymore. - Culture of paranoia and inferiority-complexes on the product side; culture of paranoia, inferiority-complexes, micromanagement, immaturity and meaningless reports on the business side. Aside from the CEO, I have encountered perhaps two or three "star performers" or even effective leaders at the Director level or above. Some good product people, but often led by people who have no business there and were a favorite of some executive who knows no better. - The CEO means well and is a definite step up from the immature leadership of the founders, but seems about 20 years behind the curve. It feels like we are an AOL dial-up era tech company with a auto dealer network. - Having a few executives sell MILLIONS of dollars in stock options right before our stock plummeted was kind of a bad look. Also, I've lost track of how many VPs, Directors and even founders have resigned in the last year or so... - Weird organizational structure with VPs and Directors who don't have a single direct report, and other leftovers from the founding era and a tiny, bankrupt acquired company that are leading things they clearly can't manage well. Net result is low morale, secrecy, lack of transparency, and high turnover. Definitely no focus, aside from all the core values crap they once slapped on the walls. - Hard to find a real pro in the office, or anyone who is into impartial and honest development of their employees. They don't do regular feedback here, they do blindside accusations that have crushed many of my coworkers. It seems nobody in leadership here has accomplished anything but building hype about a crappy tech product (aside from the CEO, who did his thing well before the Iphone was invented). - While I don't work for them directly, it seems some of the other business groups here ( like operations, partner, accounting) are extremely micromanaged and stale, and lose/fire lots of talented people while keeping yes men who can crank out powerpoints to pat each other on the back with (and confuse product with). Lots of power and attention is placed in the auto-dealer group, which are good guys but as far removed from tech as possible. None of this mixes well. Judging by the stock price, maybe that strategy isn't working so well. - Unhelpful culture; pockets of good people mostly led by passive-aggressive arrogant people who wouldn't be able to cut it anywhere else, yet act like they are at Google (minus the whole world-class excellence and hard-driving growth and accountability part). HR is completely untrustworthy. Hard to believe this company has been around for 13 years, given how amateur it seems in almost every respect. I've never been at a place with more undeserved arrogance.