Pros
Central location near city and commuter train lines and nice physical office space Competitive salary and benefits Diverse workforce
Cons
Most people still working at Gogo don't want to be there anymore for many of the reasons outlined below (and more). Financial Instability: Over the past year, Gogo’s stock price has plummeted over 50%. The company is unprofitable and burning cash at an alarming rate. The CEO has publicly acknowledged that Gogo needs additional capital to survive. Either the interest payments and debt will bankrupt the company, or it will be sold to some poor sap who will decide what to do with the remaining employees. Top Heavy Management: Gogo has an overwhelming number of VPs and Directors, but it will take awhile to figure out what most of them actually do. Inflated titles leads these people to feel like they should weigh in on every decision. As a result, even seemingly simple decisions are routed to the Executives. Unclear ownership also leads VPs/Directors to constantly second guess each other because no one really knows what’s going on anyways. Directors spend the rest of their time randomly jumping into situations while adding no value in an attempt to make it look like they’re contributing. High Attrition: Turnover has been high for several years, but fresh bodies were consistently recruited to mask the problem. Overall employee count rose for a couple years until recently when all open requisitions were frozen and a layoff occurred. The layoff was not substantial enough to properly reorganize the company, nor will it be sufficient to alleviate the financial woes. Instead, it seems to have been a wakeup call to the company’s talented employees who have been fleeing in droves. The employees who remain are mostly checked out and looking for new jobs. Lack of Accountability: Excessive levels of management also serve to insulate the Executives and SVPs from learning the truth about mistakes, issues, and poor decisions (of which there are many). Each level is incentivized to cover up a problem so that by the time an Executive hears about it, the story has become so convoluted that no one can figure out the truth. There is no sense of scale or scope when it comes to what each level of management is accountable for at Gogo. Clueless Management: In additional to the disjointed structure, it is clear that many of the VP/Director ranks were successful following the mantra “fake it ‘til you make it”. Many of those who make up this crusty level of management are visibly in over their head. Many have been with the company since before its rapid growth and simply are not capable of effectively leading teams or projects at a quickly growing public company. It’s amateur hour. Uncollaborative silos: It’s hard to imagine a less collaborative environment especially considering the small size of the company with most of the employees based in the Chicago office. The left hand truly does not know what the right is doing. This issue is related to both the top heavy and clueless management in that people spend more time trying to hide mistakes than working together to find solutions. Lack of Process/Documentation: At first, the complete lack of any documentation on anything can be frustrating, but after awhile it becomes something of a joke for more tenured employees. Someone will ask in a meeting if a particular change to a process/design/order was documented and everyone will have a good laugh knowing that no such thing exists. If something happened 6 months ago, good luck finding any background on it.
