Demand Media Reviews in Santa Monica, CA

Pros

Communication between departments within media engineering is excellent.

Management and Senior Management are very skilled and respectable. Their ideas are creative and notable.

The company culture is very friendly and open, you can be honest with managers and senior managers, and they will be honest with you.

The compensation is good. The benefits are above average.

Cons

Bad press because of underpaid editors and authors creating bad content.

Lack of engineering background by senior management and product management.

Advice to Senior Management

The culture in the Santa Monica offices is awesome, keep it up.

Pros

* Enthusiasm for projects and initiatives
* Good place to work hard
* Public stock options
* Still some fun to be had

Cons

There's management bias towards the "old guard", people who have been together since the Myspace and NetZero days. It's hard to break into that pool, and ideas that come from within that circle are much more likely to be respected than ideas from outside that circle.

Working long days is expected. You can always hire someone to have a life for you, right?

Pros

people are smart and nice

Cons

some of the senior leadership team members are a little lost as the company tries to transition from an SEO-driven business

Advice to Senior Management

take time to think through what you need to do in order to get rid of the Content Farm reputation

Pros

1. The prestige and fast growth of the company looks great on your resume.
2. You get really high access to the company's inner workings.
3. The environment is so fun.

Cons

1. They demand too much in-office time from interns.
2. It's easy to fall into the "give it to the free intern" slump of doing menial work.

Advice to Senior Management

Yes, you are a "fun" and "young" office. Don't forget that your young interns are only a couple years younger than many of your employees.

Pros

Good pay and profit-sharing with stock options
People very friendly and fun
Exposure to high-traffic websites development
Company-paid lunch every Friday

Cons

Code quality deteriorates due to aggressive deadlines
Poor work/life balance (people call you outside of working hours for work)
Work is not that interesting

Advice to Senior Management

Provide engineering more time to deliver features. Aggressive schedules eventually will burn out engineers. Celebrate successes.

Pros

It's a great place to work due to the somewhat diverse and relaxed culture. The Santa Monica office is sandwiched between the 3rd Street Promenade and the beach.

Cons

Meetings can be unproductive. The growth of the company has changed its culture from what it was a year or more ago in a negative way.

Advice to Senior Management

Keeping a relaxed culture yet being successful is very attractractive to talented people. If the company loses that then trouble awaits you.

Pros

Arranging for time off never a problem. Lots of great people.

Cons

Extremely poor senior management. No defined company direction.

Advice to Senior Management

Pick a direction and focus on it. There cannot be 15 simultaneous projects that are unrelated. There's no company that will buy Demand because no one needs 20 mediocre projects. You could sell ehow, and that's about it.