Booker Reviews

UNCOMPETITIVE COMPENSATION Uncompetitive compensation is the number one problem at Booker. When compared on Glassdoor to average salaries for similar positions at similar companies in the same area, Booker pays anywhere from 25-50% less. This discrepancy in pay even occurs within Booker between employees in the same or similar roles. Specific examples include an employee who took over the position of a leaving employee with the same title, responsibilities, and experience, but made $20,000 less (~30% less); an employee who had been promoted multiple times and had been in their current role for a year was earning about $45,000 less (~50% less) than what a new employee in the same role received; a person was hired at $25,000 less (~35% less) than the average for the role based on Glassdoor; people hired into the Customer Experience department make less than people hired into the same roles one or two years ago. For two years in a row, annual performance reviews have come with no opportunity of an increase in compensation. In 2014 for the 2013 year, many managers did not conduct reviews unless approached by their employees even though HR had a clear performance review policy. In 2015, for the 2014 year, HR stated that reviews would come with no compensation increase; this would be discussed at a later time in 2015. An increase in compensation only happens when people are promoted or they offer their resignation. When promoted, the increase does not match the fair market compensation for that role. INSIGNIFICANT BENEFITS PTO is constantly being reduced for new employees. Over 20 days used to be offered a few years ago, then was reduced to around 15, and now it's down to 10. Sick days are included in PTO so that means even fewer vacation days. Health, dental, and vision insurance are offered along with other supplemental things like life and disability. However, the health insurance is extremely expensive, around $175 a month for an individual on the lowest plan and the company doesn't cover costs on a tiered basis, so entry level employees pay the same price for insurance as do executives. A 401(k) plan is offered but with no company match nor one being implemented in the foreseeable future. Options are offered but in a very limited amount and how many a person receives varies based on when they joined and whether they were promoted from within to their current position or were hired into that position (promoted employees have fewer options because they received fewer upon hire and are not given an amount equivalent to their new position). NO CAREER GROWTH / LACK MEANINGFUL PROMOTIONS Booker is a company where experienced people can go to work on a complex product, not a place for entry level people looking to learn or grow within the company. With little training, it is hard to attain the skills required to move up or to a different department. And even when employees have the skills for an open position, an outside person is brought in to fill the role. This happens for almost all management level roles and above. Instead, useless titles like Senior and Lead are given to employees to keep them “happy” for another year. Additionally, with these titles comes almost full management responsibilities but very little pay increase, the justification from executives being that these are not management positions. Specific goals for teams and individuals are not set by management, nor are performance requirements, so come annual reviews, management can give out any grade and not have to justify their decision. In the Customer Experience department, the VP was able to promote specific people the VP liked without a transparent process for doing so. In Product, people were passed up for promotions for reasons including that they “looked too young” and that they didn’t come in early enough, even though they often stayed late into the night to meet unrealistic deadlines. In Tech, the Director of Back End “conducted” reviews by sending an email with the HR review document filled out; employees had to seek out the Director to get a meeting to discuss the “review”. NO TRAINING / NO DOCUMENTATION Booker was built with contractors from day one and that continues today, with a large part of the tech team, from developers to QA, working remotely as part of outsourcing companies. This setup has led to pockets of knowledge and poor documentation of code. Very few people understand the platform well and there is no established way of documenting how new features work and how they integrate into the overall system. Onboarding of new employees is almost non-existent except in the sales and customer experience departments. In the tech department, no training on the software is provided, no development environment and other starting tools are provided, and management provides very little in the way of guidance and training and instead relies on teammates to do management’s job. Booker has held Lunch & Learns to help promote people sharing knowledge but the environment has become so non-collegial that people don’t want to invest in sharing because there is no reward and they don’t feel they are part of a team. POOR MANAGEMENT / LEADERSHIP Besides a hard-to-use and complex product, management is the second most likely reason for Booker to fail. They are inexperienced leaders and come from backgrounds unrelated to business-management software development. They believe that hiring more and more people is the solution to Booker’s problems and state that “we need to hire for this role so that the new person can figure out what we should do.” Ironically, hiring people is not a budget problem, but paying current employees fair market value is a problem. Management has very unrealistic growth expectations that they sell to employees and investors to encourage them to stay and invest, respectively. Sales projections are based on hoped-for partnerships that require a great deal of software development and run time, neither of which Booker has. Unless certain executives are replaced and a different strategy for the company is implemented, Booker is not likely to survive and not a place to bet a startup career on. HIGH EMPLOYEE TURNOVER Employee turnover is a serious problem at Booker. For over a year, Booker's maintained about a 25% per year turnover, meaning that with around 200-250 employees, one person a week, on average, leaves the company. While there are employees who have been there longer, including a co-founder, the average employee tenure is about 1-2 years even though the company is over 7 years old. A majority of employees who have been with the company for more than six months express their desire to leave the company or their unhappiness with the company. Management has conducted numerous surveys to determine why employees are unhappy and are leaving, but few meaningful changes have been made. The biggest complaint of employees is compensation. QUESTIONABLE ETHICS The ethics at Booker is particularly troubling with some stand-out examples. Booker will do many things to market itself to potential customers, including paying employees to direct only satisfied customers who are willing to give a 5 star rating to a software review website and encouraging employees to vote on the best spa software in the American Spas’ 2014 Professional's Choice Awards. In regards to the latter, an email from the Director of Brand and Reputation at Booker was sent to all employees stating to vote for Booker but “When asked for your contact information, provide your personal email and telephone number NOT your Booker email.” This was followed up with an email stating “PLEASE NOTE: Do not do this from your work IP — you have to enter from your personal account.” Based on this email, having employees vote for Booker was not only unethical but also not allowed by the awards organization. Booker from time to time will offer an award to people who help out with large projects. Such an award was given out in 2014 to the group that worked on implementing a new enterprise client, working long hours with a very tight deadline. One of the employees working on this project found another job towards the completion of the project and gave his customary two week notice. The award was a baseball game for the team but this employee was not allowed to attend because his last day of employment was the day before the game. Even though he had put in months of hard work on the project and left on good terms, he was not allowed to attend the game. A similar thing happened to an employee who had been with the company for a year and a half and resigned in November of 2014. The employee wanted to attend the holiday party held the first week of December and was allowed to do so but was mandated to pay $80, even though the employee had RSVPed to the event while employed so the headcount was accounted for and the employee had worked there the entire year. The reason for the required payment was because “that’s the policy”. Another instance of poor ethics and possibly illegal discrimination came during reviews from a manager who told an employee that the employee couldn’t receive a senior title because the employee “looked too young” and “how would that title be perceived by others”. A final troubling development is the opening of an office in Philadelphia. The stated rationale behind this was cheaper office space. Philadelphia is not a tech hub, certainly nothing like San Francisco, Austin, Boston, or other cities with available talent. When asked if other cities were considered, the answer was no. This leads one to believe that “cheaper office space” was not a deciding factor. Given that the executive had already hired two friends into VP and Director level positions, providing jobs for friends was a probable reason. Coincidentally, they all live in Philadelphia and commute to New York for Booker. It wouldn’t be surprising if in a few months, these executives permanently work from the Philadelphia office. This would not be far-fetched because two VPs already work remotely, in addition to a large part of tech that is outsourced abroad.