A little bit of wheat in a whole lot of chaff
Pros
** After working at SK, you will know all the red flags before joining a company. Your next job will be a much better one, thanks to SK. __________ ** Flexible work timings, though I think the upper limit to the in-time is fixed at 11.00am now. __________ ** Fun people to work with (mostly outside the senior management) __________ ** Decent place to work if you don't have to work directly with the CEO. __________ ** They have a TT table (and you can play if you bring your own TT paddles) __________ ** At least in my department, work was limited to office hours (however I have heard of other being contacted at 3am IST to fix seemingly small bugs)
Cons
This is loooooooong, but pretty darn accurate. Once you have worked on Sportskeeda for any amount of time, you will invariably agree with this assessment. To make an informed decision before starting at SK, please do read. __________ ** Founder/CEO - Sportskeeda would be a much better place if it had a better leader at the helm, who knew the difference between a CEO and Manager. He is puzzled and indecisive, makes poor business decisions (snubbed off the only data provider that runs half the business after building exclusive components for ingesting their data without any data provider backups), no sense of humour, closed minded, will not support the right things not done his way, miser, cares only for the balance sheets, micro-manages literally everyone, indulges in favoritism (will conduct work review meetings without the people responsible of creation of the said work), has allegedly fired people for turning on the AC, has allegedly "bribed" people to not resign by offering better positions in 3 months in other non-affiliated companies among other things. __________ **Work - Employees are mostly unhappy across the company. There is no freedom - creative or otherwise, good ideas are not implemented, CEO rules with an iron fist, attrition is high - so much so that you may see the whole staff change over a period of 9 -12 months. You will slog on impossible deadlines and targets. __________ ** Product team - Even when a senior product manager with 15 years of experience, who also was a successful entrepreneur, the reigns of Product Management are held tightly by the CEO and senior management - who will meddle in all decisions, and will not let the person perform their duties. Product managers are hired and fired regularly, for no good reason. __________ ** Design team - Sportskeeda is not a design forward company. Design decisions are made without a designer in the room. "You do not know the product" is the most common thing the CEO will say completely unwarranted to the designer that had practically re-designed the whole ecosystem way better than the existing one. The testing method as explained by senior management is "lets release it and if anyone reports it to be broken, we'll fix it". This is not a place you get to practice any of design approaches. __________ ** Tech team - The tech stack is difficult to maintain, at best. The code base is horribly written since no standards are followed. Adding a new feature will inevitably break a lot of things. Documentation if poor at best, only the senior management knows the full system (who has very cunningly risen to this position on the back of other's hard work, akin to having built the Taj Mahal the laborers' arm were chopped). While I was there I saw the Tech team grow to 10-12 devs and then shrink to 4 devs in a matter of 3-4 months. __________ ** Creative and Content departments - They are practically the most overlooked bunch of people in this media and content company. All the CEO cares about is page views (and by extension advert views) so the content quality is poor at best. __________ ** People Team - They try to run a tech company like they would run a call center or a factory line of uneducated laborers. Poor soft skills and conflict resolution abilities (threatening is after-all a strategy in "negotiations"), "Absolutist" (if you don't mind my pun, geddit? 'Absolute Sports' Hah!). __________ ** Money - You will not have any. The salaries are below market level for most positions across departments, especially outside tech. Yearly appraisals are around 7-10% (even if you have a 4+/ 5 rating). __________ ** Policies - Policies are changed ever so often without notifying the employees. While I was there benefits like work-from-home were retracted. Leave policy has special terms and conditions. Monthly working hours average to maintain - 9 hours, however you must be present in office for more than 7.5 hours each day or it is counted as a half day. Policies are inconsistently applied - some people who are close to the CEO are known to have infinite leaves without loss of pay. __________ ** False promises - Sportskeeda is known to make false promises regarding various things during the interview process. You may or may not get what was advertised in the job offering (especially macbooks/ other tech) __________ ** Office space - The less I write about it, the better. The office stinks, quite literally, like an old, fungi-ridden, wet napkin. There's a little niche for "pantry" where the only coffee machine is operational thanks to the office boy's handiwork. The washrooms have actually overflown and spewed all their "content" (which still might be better than the content shared on SK) on the office floor (allegedly, the carpet weren't even decontaminated). Parking spots are limited to a few bikes only.
