BabyCenter Reviews

Pros

Relaxed environment, nice people, good coffee

Cons

over half the staff is contracted and therefore has NO benefits

Advice to Senior Management

Hire people for real! stop relying on contractors.

Pros

Reward to know you are helping moms and moms-to be.
Flexible work schedule.

Cons

The building is a shack. Very dirty streets. Pretty disgusting.
Leadership is not focused.

Advice to Senior Management

Stay true to your audience (the readers). That should be the priority. Don't do business to please your advertisers. Spend more time building good content, then the readers will come, and then the advertisers will naturally follow.

Pros

Good work/life balance, for the most part. The people are great (except for upper management, who have no idea what's going on). Great location in San Francisco.

Cons

It used to be a great place to work. Current CEO is driving the place into the ground, caring more about profits and a fancy redecoration of her office instead of people (employees and users). Upper management does not listen the the people who actually do the work. Lots of idiotic decisions, all of which start at the top.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees. It's not all about profits, it's about people.

Pros

BabyCenter really focuses on achieving a good work life balance. Since the company is so family focused no one bats an eye if you need to take a day off to stay home with a sick kid, or yourself. I rarely work late or on weekends which is not the norm for a software engineer. They implemented an agile process for development that helped create reasonable workloads. Lastly, there are some great people at BabyCenter. People that value your expertise and really attempt to help develop employees. Especially technically. Part of my goals is to attend a conference. I have never had that before at a company.

Cons

It's not working at apple. We are often not creating the newest most exciting technologies. However, we do have some great people that are incredibly smart that value the balance. The next biggest downside is it's location next to the train station. If you live on the peninsula and have to take the train it's great, but if you live in SF or East Bay it's extremely difficult to get to. It's also a fairly big company and a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson's, this raises it's head in all sorts of weird ways. An inept kludgy HR system, an inability to give out effective laptops. Things like that.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue the focus on work life balance.

Pros

Good location near Caltrain, muni, and ballpark.

Cons

Management was wonky, and in general didn't handle staffing issues very well.

Advice to Senior Management

Better communication to employees is critical.