Linden Lab Reviews

Pros

Actually showing discipline and fixing long known usability issues
Cleaning up culture focused more on internal process than success in market
New team has experience in MMO's and gaming, not just C++

Cons

'Wisdom of the crowds' lack of accountability from founder not fully out of culture yet, but close
Not pushing the envelope enough across the company

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to remove the process experiments in the past and focus on having a product that connects, amazes, entertains AND is easy to use.

Pros

If you're looking to coast for a few months/years, this is the place for you. The office is empty most of the time as most "work from home"

The only people in the office are those who truly care about the product and what's left of LL culture. The rest are most likely looking for an exit strategy.

Cons

Very demoralizing. Makes me sad just thinking about it.

Advice to Senior Management

You gave up on the Lab a long time ago. Quit pretending to care.

Pros

It's been written here a dozen times:
1) the colleagues and friends at LL are what endures. At one point LL attracted industry-leading talent to work on the the virtual world revolution. Those people and the strong culture they created through 2007-2009 created an incredibly strong ex-Linden community that lasts to this day.
2) the small size of the company relative the the huge technical infrastructure, combined with relatively big budgets allowed for low level access and responsibility with powerful and complex systems.

Cons

Many negative glass door reviews can be dismissed as 'sour grapes' or some kind of failure that the reviewer is not living up to. I recognize that when I say: Linden Lab of 2011 really is an awful place to work. It didn't use to be like that. It really is the current CEO, CFO and their tragically bad leadership. Control of information, decimating company culture, inability to hear criticism, making decisions based on ego not based on known fact -- all traits that have seen the CEO roll out one failure after another in 2011. Internally, the company is dominated by the CFO who bullies people and uses his control of the purse strings to micromanage all aspects of the company. He has created a culture of fear, distrust and blame. After 8 years of no exit strategy, the board is checked out. They seem willing to buy anything that the CEO tells them and have given up on all accountability. Worse yet is that the CFO and CEO are recruiting friends into power positions who are not qualified to be in those positions or who thrive on the cabal. They lack the industry knowledge of online games, virtual worlds, or anything social, and worse yet have zero leadership skills to execute on anything. No one at the mid-management or line-level respects them. It's very dysfunctional.

Linden Lab is a troubled organization, masked by the positive balance sheet and the blessed residents who pay and persist. By all measures of a company's internal health, LL is troubled: inability to retain talent, inability to innovate, release successful products that move financial or retention needs, and employee dissatisfaction as evident by the exodus of great people from LL in 2011 (two VP's, several Sr Directors, lots of top tech talent). Second Life could have innovated and stayed relevant but the lack of leadership in 2011 has buried the company. The real failure isn't about virtual worlds. It's the tragic, heart-wrenching failure in top management that has brought the Lab to where it is today. If you're looking to the future, go to a different company.

Pros

Offices are nice, modern and have well stocked kitchens. You will love a good deal of your coworkers.

Cons

Remote offices are viewed as stepchildren, when they are viewed at all. If you are not at headquarters you are unpromotable. Compensation within departments varies quite a bit, relating only it seems on when and whom hired you. Employee moral within most departments resides somewhere near complacency. Promotions are rare, raises even more unheard of for most. Bonuses are dangled but never materialize. Direction changes quarterly. General impression no one knows who the end user is or what they want.

Advice to Senior Management

Step back and take a look at how this company has become so self hating over the past few years. Then address this. People once loved working here.

Pros

The great people make it worthwhile working at LL, especially in San Francisco. The engineering culture is great. The technology has so much potential.

Cons

It was hard at times to hang onto the merry-go-round during senior management changes in 2010! Layoffs seemed arbitrary, management seemed out of touch and to have unrealistic engineering *and* customer expectations.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on fewer initiatives
Invest in getting those things solid, not just "minimum viable product"
Listen
Communicate, bridge the gap between management and engineers

Pros

- Internet scale problems in databases, networking, and operations.
- Really cool technology that is easy for non-technical people to understand.
- Awesome, sexy product
- Involved, passionate users
- Amazingly smart and talented employees

Cons

Some of the strong cultural traditions at Linden include personal independence and a rejection of authority. This makes it very difficult to assert leadership, forge teams, and deliver projects.

Advice to Senior Management

You've worked hard over the last year to offend your workers and drive them away. It would be nice if you tried to address some of those wounds, heal the morale, and stop treating the employees as if they are an irritating afterthought.

Pros

Lindens are without a doubt some of the most intelligent, caring, and fun individuals you'll ever have the pleasure of working with. I've never felt so welcome or felt so recognized for my contributions before. Second Life is a crazy, insane idea with crazy, non-straight forward problems to solve. TONS of room for development, learning, and implementing great software. I'm not too familiar with sr management as it keeps on changing, but relationship and communication with immediate managers and team members is usually pretty open and relaxed. The benefits are great (compared to my previous gig - though admittedly, not in SF or this industry), and people are very flexible with when you work, as long as you get your work done.

As an engineer there's also a lot of opportunity to make tremendous improvements, or horribly break the entire grid.

I'm real excited with Rod coming on board as CEO. He brings a lot of good energy to the team, though whether or not he performs has yet to be seen. We've also hired a some very promising technical VPs who have the opportunity and (hopefully the ability) to offer the engineering teams som much needed direction.

Cons

I've had project management experiences at the lab that are either wonderful, or nonexistent. With the lack of technical management in the past, there's been a lot of hesitance from the engineers to step up and own projects or aspects of the system (which is kind of understandable because the system is very complicated and not easily owned by one person). As a result, though, it's sometimes difficult to find out who to talk to about certain systems.

The management crisis over the past year has been a real downer. We've gone from Phillip to M to our CFO acting as interim (who made a lot of tough decisions and probably saved the company), back to Phillip for a short burst of "OMG this is awesome" and fizzled out to "this isn't working", and now to Rod, on whose shoulders our collective fate lies. I've been real impressed with Rod so far, but as I said before, it's too early to tell how things will work out. The upper management changes and the subsequent changes in Linden culture as many of the old die hards finally move on, has a tendency to get people down. All of this change has sapped the energy of a lot of wonderful people.
Hopefully all this has pretty much settled down, though. We'll see how these next two years pan out.

Although I'm still optimistic that we can get some positive momentum going, each time a dear friend leaves it hurts that momentum.

Advice to Senior Management

Trust your engineers. You have some of the best in the industry. Don't stifle creativity by trying to turn linden culture into a real company culture. Embrace the culture, let yourself relax, and think about your employees when you dictate what direction they should work in. Other than that, stay positive.

Pros

Linden was at one time very innovative and engaging, and really invested in its people. Many individuals were moved or promoted into new roles and the opportunity for advancement was high.

Cons

Sadly as time has gone on these positives have changed, and there is very little opportunity to grow. The company has gone from a mission driven, highly invested place to a bottom line only organization, which is very very sad for both the company and the customers.

Advice to Senior Management

Rethink your position on what you want to accomplish. Engage with your employees and your customers. Communicate with your employees and customers, and if the bottom line has changed, tell people so that they can make an informed choice about how they interact with you.

Pros

*Set your own hours

*Work from home, 100% if you want

*Travel the world on the company's money, if it's justified (and sometimes if it isn't)

*Gobs of talent at the worker-bee level

*Flexibility to move around to different projects if you want

*Really interesting work - complex and challenging problems to be solved

Cons

*Few people assume responsibility for projects they're involved in. Those who do seem to get fired.

*"Getting Things Done" often results in disapproval, and sometimes even a talking to from PR and legal, even for wins and non-issues.

*Most project groups have their own processes different from others.

*Most processes are old and inefficient. System administration and change management really come to mind here.

*Business folks view technical must-do's as things to negotiate. Since the business folks are the ones setting development priorities, and developers tend not to be good negotiators, this leads to cutting corners, resulting in fragile software with poor performance.

*Regardless of your actual job within the Lab, going into public places in Second Life with a Linden account nearly always results in unprovoked harassment, threats, and abuse from residents. It's demoralizing.

*The "love machine" is mainly a popularity contest that pays money.

*The quarterly review system encourages positive feedback and discourages negative feedback. It isn't built into the system per se, but it is a psychological result of the way it's set up. This makes it so people rarely hear about the important things they need to improve. The system needs to be a little less communal and a little more top-down.

*People in customer service positions are treated like second-class citizens. They get nowhere near the same respect or perks as everyone else.

Advice to Senior Management

All the reviews here seem to blame upper management for lack of direction. There was a period of time where upper management was fairly incompetent, but I'm not sure it was all their fault. They are constrained by their superiors (the board of directors), for whom they take all of the blame. After seeing a consistent pattern across departments, I realized the company's real problem is lack of direction and micro-management by the board. THEY are the ones who see a lot of (really great, in my opinion) proposals and then come back with decisions to do something completely different that no one else wants. A week later they revise the idea, then a few days later they do it again or even revert to some previous idea, and so on.

With that said, my advice to both the board of directors and upper management is this:

*When your worker-bee level employees and customers say the same things, listen carefully. They're smarter than you.

*Don't outsource components that aren't a _perfect_ fit. Stop smashing square pegs into round holes.

Pros

The technology and the remaining Lindens are, as always, the biggest attraction.

Cons

Prior to mid-year 2010, LInden Lab was the extraordinary workplace that everyone said that it was (including reviews on this Site); astonishingly bright, accomplished, and interesting developers all working together on the technology years ahead of anything else. In June '10, the slide began--30% of all employees laid off in one day. After this, a steady stream of resignations from among the most experienced and senior Lindens.Philip Rosedale came back as CEO but only stayed three months leaving the Lab without a CEO for another six moths.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't delegate management of the Lab to the HR Department; doing so has only accelerated the Lab's decline.