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Cheetah Digital

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Fires Stellar Talent, Hires Disloyal Incompetence - Anonymous employee Cheetah Digital Employee Review

1.0
24 Nov 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great views from the 17th floor of the New York office. Toilets that flush automatically -- which is a good thing for those who are a little forgetful. Telecommuting freedom for some employees. If you have no skills, you can still flourish here by brown-nosing the willing management. Pro tip: You should comment early and often in the ceo slash channel.

Cons

One restroom on the entire floor for 100+ people. The people who sit outside the restroom keep tabs on you. The new management is Hitchcock-level creepy and secretive: They are apparently trying to recreate their old company (Exact Target) that was sold for an outrageous amount of money to Salesforce some years ago. They have even moved Cheetah Digital's headquarter from New York to Indianapolis since that's where Exact Target was located. In fact, the new headquarter is in the same old Exact Target office! You can't make this up. Reality is stranger than fiction. They are also poaching/luring their old Exact Target co-workers from Salesforce, etc., while simultaneously aggressively purging the existing money-making talent from the established CheetahMail/Experian ranks. Some employees are speculating whether the new leadership is trying to replicate the Exact Target sale to SalesForce and make another outrageous profit. Whatever is going on, the management seems to all be in on it. You constantly have an unsettling feeling that they're not letting you in on the shape of things to come. The new Exact Target leadership is an insecure bunch with poor or COBOL-outdated skills in technology and business: No wonder they eagerly bought Experian's Marketing Services business with its plethora of nightmarishly incompatible products and are now promoting the least stable and least profitable one of them all. As expected, the new leadership was completely sold by the Conversen product's slightly shinier UI. The current leadership, who I'm convinced played a role in the acquisition of Experian's Marketing Services arm, didn't do their due diligence. They could have been forgiven for falling for Experian's sales pitch, but now, one-and-a-half years later, they still don't, are unable to or refuse to understand the company. Like Experian, they make a lot of bad decisions and also refuse to listen to their experienced staff. Naturally, the company isn't doing too well as one can deduce amid all the desperate austerity measures taken lately (travel ban, pot luck company parties, diminishing bonuses, deterioration of health care insurance, etc.). The ET leadership has poor management skills: They loathe/ignore/don't understand advice and punishes employees with creative ideas. They are super defensive and can take absolutely no joke, criticism, suggestion. They seek praise and fake smiles from scared employees. If you have what it takes to pull off a fake smile, the leadership will love you. If you have what it takes to spew out inane comments and buzzwords on the ceo slack channel, you may get rewarded with a promotion right there on the spot. In case you're a former Exact Target employee and decide to join the infestation, you can look forward to some good times. But beware! Travel light as you will most certainly also fall out of favor sooner than later. Managers for the embarrassing and laughable flagship "Conversen" product, stubbornly refuse to let experts elsewhere in the company give advice or help them out. They love to headlessly and arrogantly reinvent the wheel, reengineering stuff from scratch without involving in-house experts who work on other, less favored products and other experts who don't have the management's ear. If you at some point would want to relocate from the East or West coasts to the sweat shops in the jungles or to the new Indianapolis/Chicago HQ, you'd have to be prepared for a significant pay cut. If you're a manager, this probably wouldn't apply and you could merrily continue to milk the cow from your countryside mansion doing nothing.

Explore other reviews about Cheetah Digital

5.0
27 Jan 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Opportunities for growth Great management (in my experience) Good pay

Cons

Normal large company issues / corks

3.0
22 Apr 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

We can take the holidays, un-limited paid days off (between vacation and sick leave), evaluated in case you need a LOA instead.

Cons

pay is way below average in the rest of the country (CR), if you work with a retail account get ready to work extra hours because there's usually not enough coverage after office hours and retail accounts are always late

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