Company on a Depressing Path - Anonymous employee Gogotech Employee Review

Thank you so much for your thoughts and advice. It’s now official – Glassdoor is the Jerry Springer of online workplace reviews. A place where spectators can be entertained by the bitter rants of semi-stable individuals about their former workplaces as a form of cheap therapy. We certainly hope that coming on here to spew your venom masked behind the anonymity of the Internet helps you to feel better about your career trajectory. Here are my responses to what I think I heard from you: * It sounds like you witnessed co-workers making fun of an ex-employee in our offices but didn’t have the courage to stop them or say anything to anyone at any time (until now). Well done! * We trust our employees and, to be honest, didn’t feel that harassment seminars were needed. Cost wasn’t part of that equation * We only play ping pong 10 times a year because I won the last office tournament and I’m not eager to hold another one. 10 times a year is actually a lot of ping pong * You’re bitter that some responsibilities in our company are being shifted to lower cost regions of the world than midtown Manhattan and instead of recognizing that as an opportunity to expand your own capabilities, skillsets and experiences as the leader of a multinational team – which is what 10 managers from our New York office will be traveling to India later this year to accomplish – you’d rather come on here and whine about your missed opportunities and the inappropriateness of my transparency during company meetings * You spent time, presumably work hours, witnessing others “strategizing” about illegal improvements to our website and other scams. Sorry but there’s a reason we don’t violate state and federal laws by improperly storing credit card information. Maybe in your next position you can implement those creative ideas outside the confines of, you know, a law-abiding company * Yes, we did catch people attempting to cheat our company and, yes, we let those people go for obvious reason. There are often, though not always, people who attempt to find shortcuts to success. I’m not sure why you’re blaming us for their lack of a moral compass but I guess your point is that they had no choice since we were, you know, sending their work to ‘furiners’ * It’s not we who didn’t ask questions, it’s you. Next time you should. I always include a Q&A session at the end of each company meeting in case you, you know, want to ask a question * No one here, to my knowledge, uses software in violation of any terms. We pay quite a bit each year to keep it that way. If you needed a Photoshop account I sure wish you had spoken up * We do like Slack. We don’t use it to bully ex-employees (to my knowledge) but it’s a pretty friendly app and, as you noted, it’s free. We tend to smile when we use it * Sorry you feel open office seating is overcrowded but makeshift tables in between doorways would be a fire code violation so, as far as I know, we never do that * Yes, we do charge for a “seat” when we calculate commissions. That’s called overhead and unfortunately we have to pay it too in the form of rent. Exactly why do you object to having a profit-sharing formula that attempts to calculate contribution dollars before allocating a portion of it to employee commissions? * Our office is quite beautiful. We’ve posted pictures here and I’m not aware of any black grime * I do use Google (wonderful site) and I guess I have a few friends. Thanks for noticing I’m not even going to comment on the remainder of your rant other than to say that a few months ago, after reading about the Zappo’s experiment, I made a bold commitment to our company culture when I offered every senior manager a generous severance package. Since the vast majority of them had been with the company for 3 or more years, this translated into a 3-month severance deal for each of them with no questions asked. I didn’t make them read ‘Reinventing Organizations’, transition their work load, watch videos, or otherwise drink the Holacracy kool-aid the way Tony did. You can rant all you want about the perceived differences between our offers but the illustrative point is that 18% of Zappos employees headed for the exit when Tony made his offer while not a single manager from Gogotech took mine. I guess you’re bitter because you wanted that quick payday but you weren’t part of our management team. There’s a reason for that – you hadn’t earned it. In any case, I’m an enormous fan of Tony Hsieh and I think he’s doing some incredible experimentation on flat organizational structure. I hope that doesn’t make me a ‘straight up liar’. So good luck in your next position and I guess after you leave that job we’ll all be curious to hear your thoughts when you sneak off into the corner to post them onto the GlassDoorSpringerShow. Kind regards, Haas