MLB Advanced Media Reviews

Pros

- Friendly, fun people
- Baseball / Sports on all the time around the office
- Fast paced development and deployment
- Innovative company at the forefront of streaming media

Cons

- Small hourly wage for New York City
- Unorganized in many areas
- People say the baseball glamour factor wears off quickly

Pros

-good for career advancement bc everyone has heard of MLB
-management is committed to pushing cutting edge technology so you will have the opportunity to work on new and cool tech
-company pays 100% of health benefits for you and dependents

Cons

-pretty much all of IT is on call 24/7
-management is hostile to work/life balance
-management has no compunctions about asking you to work nights and weekends on little or no notice
-pay is below industry standard
-promotions come without raises

Advice to Senior Management

Realize that the company is guaranteed to succeed because of exclusive content rights. Its success has nothing to do with your brilliance

Pros

If you have a day job and want some money on the side, it's not a bad place to work, especially if you like baseball.

Cons

If you don't like working nights or past midnight, this might not be for you. In the department I worked in part-time, it seemed if you weren't best friends with some of the decision-makers you received less shifts even if you thought you were good at the job function.

Advice to Senior Management

When someone always says they're available for a shift, give them at least one, especially if they don't call out or come up with a reason why they can't make it.

Pros

get to work with great content
staff are very friendly and competent, easy to work with
flexible hours
free baseball games

Cons

a lot of the brain trust/talent that made MLB.com successful has since departed
exec management are a bunch of good ol' boys riding a gravy train of exclusive content from MLB
lack of focus on any products not related to video content/subscriptions

Advice to Senior Management

Executive management needs to put as much emphasis on product development and user experience as they do content licensing. Also, might want to work on changing the perception of executive management which is that they are greedy and ethically challenged.

Pros

Benefits are great.
Get a pass to any baseball game (some exculsions apply).

Cons

The pay is a little lower than available elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

Use your internal resources first.

Pros

Great team, with smart people working together. The immediate managers are very good at their jobs, and as former developers, have a great understanding of what you do.

Cons

You're expected to be on call 24/7. Upper management does a terrible job communicating with others. There are a lot of egos that clash up top, and a lot of times, you get stuck in the middle because of that. There's also no desire to promote people up the ladder and help shape their careers.

Advice to Senior Management

Allow the people who have a specialized set of skills use their expertise to make the product better, rather than feeling that they know everything because of their egos.

Pros

Great benefits, decent opportunitiesf or growth but only IF you know the right people

Cons

Middle management that is completely incapable of doing their jobs and unknowledgeable about the Internet in general

Advice to Senior Management

Look more closely at the people you've put into middle management positions... they're the ones who make or break an organization.

Pros

Co-workers for the most part are like-minded sports fans
Free pass to regular season games
Medical is fully paid by company (or was when I was there)

Cons

From the top down, hurling insults at your minions is presumed to be the proper way to improve the quality of their work. On what planet?

Advice to Senior Management

It would be nice to see an employee receive a promotion... but since it never happened in 7 years I was there, you lost a LOT of good people to other companies. It just shouldn't be that way, but I assume it still is.

Pros

A great job for passionate fans of the game. Self motivation is necessary as projects are generally long term. Deadlines are clear and assignments are distributed evenly.

Cons

Often times the hours are long regardless of the time of year. Time off is never an easy accomplishment. While the benefit package is strong, vacation time is regulated.

Advice to Senior Management

Possibly extend hours during the busiest months, rather than limited hours with more actual work days. In this industry, some semblance of a weekend is needed.

Pros

Plenty of responsibility and coverage, and working in baseball is of course rewarding. Getting paid to watch baseball -- enough said. good pension and benefits.

Cons

The site breaks less news than before.Excessively long shifts can be the rule (11 hours a shift in October) and there is no overtime. Part-timers have little to no shot of being taken on full time, but make up the majority of the front-end workforce.

Advice to Senior Management

generally good but the company would do well to pay and treat the front end staff as well as the back-end folks