Cool music perks, poor top-down management + clock watching - Recensione dipendente - Software Engineer presso iHeartMedia

Note: This review is focused on the engineering side of the company. * Clock watching, need an excuse to work from home As someone who's big on flexible work and working from home, the first 8 months were fantastic. Then management changed, and all of a sudden the hours I was in the office was a problem, and I now needed to ask for permission to work from home in advance. Being naive, I tried to convince them that I should be judged on the actual output and quality of my work rather than the perception of it, but the idea was seen as heresy and completely non-negotiable, and they seemed insulted that I'd even suggest that. * Cheap. Getting raises is a 2-3 month process that requires approval from the CFO One of my co-workers would offhandedly tell me that the company was really cheap. I didn't understand it at the time because I was happy with my salary, but when it came time to ask for a raise because I was being paid below-market, I understood. Unless you threaten to leave for a better offer on the table from a competing company, you're going to have to go through a 2-3 month process to get a raise for anything above $100k/yr. To be fair they're going bankrupt, and they probably just didn't like me enough (it's all good though, I left for another company that offered me 40% more). * They don't care about your career and ensuring that you get challenging/ interesting work. After over a year of doing important work and getting good performance reviews, I wanted to take on more challenging projects. What ended up happening was we hired a senior engineer, and all the interesting work was siphoned off to him. I wasn't even invited to the discussion table (eg. regarding large architectural decisions). When I voiced my concerns, I was told that I'd soon be put on the "interesting" work (basically just migrating features to the senior engineer's rewrite, so not really interesting) after the day-to-day stuff was done. * Top-down borderline dictatorial. Take job titles too seriously. I feel like management is a bit too top-down. Engineers should be able to allocate amongst ourselves who does what rather than being assigned work from people who aren't doing the actual work. For example, it was somehow decided that one of the more challenging longstanding bugs would be assigned to the brand new "senior engineer". Doesn't matter that anyone else might also work on it or be more qualified to solve it knowing the codebase better, it was dictated by management not involved in the day to day work. Surprise - a year and a half later and it's still not fixed (and this is a pretty mild example. Won't talk about the most absurd and biggest failure because I don't want to out anyone). When standup was moved an hour earlier, I suggested a later start time more inline with what it used to be because I'm a night owl. My suggestion wasn't taken seriously and was completely dismissed. (just to contrast this with my current job, I suggested standup to be an hour later from the original time and was told "sure"). * Work is a bit too PM driven. Backlog is basically dictated by the PM. Engineers should have more of a voice on the work they do. * Agile taken a bit too seriously. Weird fanatical obsession with metrics like sprint completion percentage. Too many meetings (standup, sprint planning, backlog refinement, demo day, retrospective) * Slight air of arrogance from the top Don't want to name any names. For the record, the president is extremely nice, and so are most of the executives and higher-ups. All it takes is one person. * No real exit interview As you can see there was a lot I wanted to talk about. I was asked to fill out an online survey, and that was it. -- I don't want to sound too negative, I enjoyed my time here in the beginning and am grateful to have been given the opportunity to work here (hence the 4 stars). But they're cheap, and I don't feel like there's any real loyalty here (unless you're seen as a superstar prodigy), so I wouldn't see this as more than a stepping stone. Turnover here is high for a reason.