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Convoluted Management, Horrible Productivity, Shady Practices - Quality Assurance SpotX Employee Review

1.0
26 Feb 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Free food and beer pretty often was a plus. Long meetings where you can zone out and let management talk to the one developer that is their favorite lets you have plenty of time for relaxing and taking care of personal work online :P

Cons

I have so many issues with this company. First and foremost, please understand that a huge majority of these glassdoor posts are faked. The "business" half of the company forces engineers to promote the company via glassdoor with incentives and constant emails. Probably against the glassdoor TOS, and if it's not it should be as the reviews are generally meaningless from current employees. Management is horrible. Product managers fore unrealistic goals and expectations onto development teams, which causes three different problems: 1. Teams work at a normal pace and cannot possibly finish the requested features and integrations on time causing developers to be penalized and lose bonuses. 2. Developers work 60 hour weeks to finish requested features on time and become depressed and overworked. 3. Teams lie about how much they can complete in a sprint and mess up their logged hours just to appease product managers who are completely oblivious to the development cycles required for different features. The general adaptation of an agile environment has completely failed for this company and causes way more hassle than it does benefit. Deadlines are literally never made, and sprints are completely useless. Some senior developers have become overly lazy and coast through sprints with little or no productivity. Integrating with other teams' work is a nightmare and usually takes a whole sprint just to make two different features work together that are hardly related because of how messy the codebase is. I was refused the chance to even be given an interview for a development position, despite having my master's degree in computer science and working for the company for 6 months as a QA. After talking to some people in the company about why this could possibly be, I learned that the company would rather hire me on at a low salary for a QA position so that it ruins my salary increase when I get "promoted" to a SE and I would be making less money after three years at the company than I would getting hired on as a Software Engineer somewhere else (which is what I did). The business model for the company relies on essentially stealing money from customers via small transnational fees. I personally felt uncomfortable about this. People who have worked here for over a year generally have a bleak outlook on the company and are upset about the lack of fair promotions. Some people were even "promoted" to a better title with a 0% increase in wage. Promotions were clearly based on favoritism. The company's future seems bleak as they fail completely to address the growing number of competitors in their space and will be entirely replaced by better managed companies. The company is also SEVERELY overexpanded, hiring way more interns than they can support. That is, because all of the money stays in upper management positions. As a side note, this is a VERY hostile environment for non-religious or atheist people. All of the team leads that I was familiar with were fundamentalist Christians who openly talked about religion and their beliefs during work time. The workplace also seems incredible gender-biased and very few females have management positions in the company.

Explore other reviews about SpotX

5.0
10 Jun 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great leadership, learning new technologies and tons of opportunity for growth

Cons

Can't serve smaller clients, no dashboard access

2.0
16 Feb 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people who you work with are very passionate and good at what they do. For the most part, there is a very collaborative nature and people tend to work well with each other and are open to new ideas.

Cons

Leadership, specifically senior and executive leadership, isn't less than desirable. SpotX leadership has yet to figure out how to scale to the current company size. with no management training, little emphasis on coaching and mentorship and a large emphasis on working in constant chaos . It is often that people feel disrespected and put down by their leaders, especially those in more senior roles. This has a profound effect on morale and shows that not only will that type of behavior will be tolerated with no consequences but that it is ok. SpotX could be a phenomenal company at scale, but unfortunately, it is clear they do not have any plans to change the culture.

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