Blinkx Reviews

Pros

Once building and location (but not actual office space), hot industry, cool technology.

Travel; for my role, face to face meetings were required and encouraged, so I was on a plane every week which meant I was NOT in the office (I'd do anything not to spend my day in that place).

Cons

Executives had ZERO experience in online video, and or online advertising, before starting blinkx so they don't know what they are doing, or what customers want. Additionally they have never truely sold enterprise software (which I was responsible for doing, even though 99% of my colleagues didn't know what I did), so Executives truly have no idea how to sell and close business. Every Quarter there would be at least one deal in which Executive team would get involved in a deal, and totally screw it up to the point where the prospect/customer would stop taking and returning calls! One time an Executive said to me; "Well you're the expert, I've never sold anything before". I sat there thinking, 'so why are you responsible for the sale's team then? And, why am I asking you on negotiating tactics then?!' Read their bios, they are complete fluff.

In every sales environment I've been in, it is expected that the sales person tailor the standard presentation to their personal style and to the audience they are presenting to. At Blinkx any deviation from the corporate deck was not tollerated. My colleauge in Ad Sales went to a client meeting with an Executive, and presented some of his own ideas. After the meeting nothing was said about the custom/new slides the rep has presented, but rather went back to tell the CEO about it. When the rep got back from his second meeting, the CEO came up to him, and asked to see the deck he had presented with Matt. The rep did so and when Suranga saw the custom slides he began yelling at the rep in front of the entire office. He didn't pull him into the conference room, but just stood their and yelled. So not only does the Executive team have zero tact in dealing with employees, but they also has no concept of collaboration, creativity, and empowering his employees to make decisions. This was an experienced Ad Sales rep, and in fact he told me later that the prospect and said they like his ideas best of all. When the concept was sold later, Marketing sent a note out saying "they" had come up with a new product- the rep got no credit.

What I found totally amazing was that the engineering team had no idea what my job was. My role was responsible for bringing in REVENUE, and yet non of the engineers had a clue that Blinkx sold software. They thought Blinkx simply sold ads on blinkx.com. How do you not tell your employees that your company sells software?

Each person who has worked for this Executive team, probably has at least a dozen stories of how inept, clueless, rude, and disrespectful, this team is. They probably also have tons of stories of how there is a lack of collaboration, trust, communication, and visibility into corporate goals, product road map (they don't even have a product road map), and overall lack of team.

Advice to Senior Management

Despite the all of these "glowing" reviews on this site, and the incredible employee churn, you will probably never change your ways. You think you know what you are doing and everyone else is wrong. Keep it up!

Pros

Interesting product, always intriguing to potential clients. Fairly good benefits as well as good technology and hardware provided to employees.

Cons

Management is totally clueless. They are unresponsive unless they need something. There is a total lack of respect for employees, who are frequently verbally chewed out and insulted in the presence of everyone else. There is no sales strategy and very little support. Management is unwilling to accept feedback because it's apparent that any suggestions are viewed as a judgement on their performance. Instead of offering positive support or suggestion, management responds to questions and feedback with the "you're not doing your job properly" response. Unwilling to accept that products are priced in a totally unrealistic manner with respect to the rest of the industry.

Advice to Senior Management

Give people a chance to be successful. Respect your employees, as they're people. not drones to be controlled. Accept feedback and criticism from salespeople and use it to better the company instead of replying with insults clearly based on insecurity. Hire management with sales experience that also live in this continent...not South America.

Pros

Nice location, beautiful office, with a great view. Good catered lunches on friday.

Cons

Blinkx has a "work pit" style floorplan, where the engineers sit between senior management, and sales people. There is a constant buzz of noise and talking on the phone, doors slamming, and a "honking" television hooked up to the server monitoring system, so the engineers get blasted by a honk, every 10 minutes. It is impossible to "get in the zone" and code.

Blinkx managers like to create what I call "artificial crunch time" - which is an arbitrarily produced type of pressure , where managers think they can squeeze faster, higher quality work out of employees by trying to constantly keep engineers in "crunch time" mode. " We are on a tight deadline, we need something for our clients to ' play with' over the weekend (friday at 1pm) .," every single friday. This type of management is effective every once in a while, but not every single day - engineers go straight to apathetic mode.

There is a complete lack of planning, project tracking, and specifications on products, because everything needed to be done "yesterday." While I have been at the other end of the spectrum, where projects end up in meeting and discussion hell, and I agree with the agile development philosophy, it only works when there is full transparency and respect.

Respect - Blinkx has an interesting way of purposely disrespecting their employees, as if intimidation and unreasonable boot camp style hazing can produce loyal, effective employees. Employees are constantly threatened with their job security.

Transparency - Everyone is purposely kept in the dark, and only partial information is given to each employee in a project. There are NEVER meetings, NEVER. Managers literally go around to each member of a project and give partial information. This is not a result of bad communication, this is purposely employed as a tactic to improve productivity.

Advice to Senior Management

Its all about respect. Thats all it comes down to. Everything else would "work" if there was a level of respect. At least pretend to try and gain the respect of your employees.

There is constantly an amazing, talented, extremely high quality team of designers and engineers at blinkx. Yet only a few stay more than 6 months. The team is talented and passionate enough that, if given freedom and time, can produce exceptionally great products with no pushing. Creativity is not encouraged at blinkx.

Pros

The location is good and the co-workers are great. Seriously the only reason I stayed at blinkx for as long as I did was because of these two reasons. The salary is relatively decent.

Cons

Managers. They have no regard for any creative input, or any input in general. There is no project management and projects are incredibly rushed. There is no time to refine and polish ideas to generate good products. You start off really excited about a project, invest blood and sweat into it and then management ends up canning it due to poorly planned timelines. In the end you feel like you've accomplished nothing. As a result blinkx is a hodge-podge of mediocrity.

There is no transparency in the company. Everything is done cloak and dagger, need to know basis, so no one knows what is going on. Half the time you find out what the next product is going to be from press releases. Also there is no business model. I worked there over a year and still have no idea how they plan to make money.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the input from your employees. They have good ideas every now and then. Let the employees make a product that they can be proud of.

Pros

For some reason other companies seem to think Blinkx is some inventive/good company. This made it a lot easier to get a better job somewhere else. They did pay pretty decent, and it wasn't really hard to get the job. Most of the entry level employees are really nice, however socializing with them is minimal.

Cons

Dealing with management. Talk about a bunch of ignorant dudes that don't know squat. It's like talking with a computer. Except they get mad and loud a lot easier. Most of the employees are right out of collage. There is no room to learn anything because everything should have been completed yesterday, and brainstorming with colleges is just a waste of time. Also, a lot of promises and lying goes on internally and externally to customers/press.

Advice to Senior Management

Strongly consider a new career path.

Pros

Interviews that are easy to ace. Makes it an easy tech job to get as a recent college graduate.

Blinkx is a company that boasts "new cool technologies" so it's easier to advance your career after you leave the place. You also learn a good mix of new tools and technologies while you are there.

Most co-workers are the young and hip crowd so they are fun to hang out with during non-working hours.

The location (financial district of San Francisco, CA) is also nice. Lots of activities in that area before, during, and after work. Free diet coke, peach vitamin water, orange juice, sparkling water, and Friday lunches.

Cons

Cursing is okay in the office so there is almost daily verbal abuse (rated MA-17) from middle and upper management. Nasty-gram emails also gets sent just as often. No feedback or constructive criticism, but rather personal criticism targeting the employee. Also, there is no main Human Resource person to talk to about these issues. We had a loaner HR person, and also nothing can be done if this abuse comes from the CEO, CTO, or CFO themselves.

Bonus compensation depends whether the CEO is having a good day or not when he is writing the checks. When I asked why I did not get the full bonus, no answer is given. There was no criticism on how I can perform better so that I can achieve the full bonus.

Management expects you to work longer hours, on weekends, and during vacation. They also expect you to be at work 5 minutes before 8:30am everyday.

Cramped workspace with 2-3 feet of elbow room between you and the next employee.

There is no serious internal documentation on any proprietary technology.

A lot of lying to the customers about features that are not there, demos/prototype that are mostly fabricated, and blatant copying of other company's products.

Lastly, when you put in your 2 weeks notice for leaving, there is a good chance that they will just tell you to take your stuff and go home on-the-spot.

Advice to Senior Management

You should ease up on the strictness a little and boost your employees' morale. Give them more incentives to work for you. Lastly, please no more nasty-grams or verbal abuses!

Pros

Excellent technical, marketing, and creative services teams consisting of bright fun people to work with.

Cons

blinkx is nothing but a sweatshop, a hostile work environment where putting down the employees through insults and cursing is the norm. There is absolutely no communication between groups which results in projects being rushed and released without adequate testing - there is no formal QA process. Employees are overworked, underappreciated and underpaid. Morale is dismally low as management acts as taskmasters rather than advisors. Ideas are suppressed - the folks tasked with implementing managements' ideas (some of them are good) have no say in how to design and create said products. There is a high turnover rate because employees leave as soon as they realize the company is rotting from the inside out and any other alternative is likely going to be a good one. Finally, because the company is cheap, there is no official blinkx HR so there are constant issues with benefits - I heard there was a period of time where employees didn't have medical coverage. Maim an arm? You're screwed.

Advice to Senior Management

Like a previous poster stated, go take some management courses. Reward your employees for the hard work that they put in. Cussing out someone is detrimental to their morale as well as everyone who sees such an encounter (everyone).

Pros

Cool technology and hot industry. It's also a good location in downtown San Francisco near the Ferry building.

Cons

The management is very poor leaders and just puppets to the primary investors. Also a very competitive industry so not a lot of upside. They structure your salary as such: 70% base salary and 30% bonus salary. That's true for all their employees! So for example say you agree to $100k salary in your offer. You'll only get a guaranteed 70k!

Advice to Senior Management

Get some management training and understand why the company has such a high turnover rate. All your employees are unhappy but you have no idea.