NexTag Reviews

Pros

nice colleagues
pay is ok
good central location, easily reachable by public transport
free breakfast provided
decent benefits package, yet nothing fancy

Cons

poor communication between head office and sales office
no clear strategy for new markets
very limited exchange of relevant information
only a handful of competent people

Advice to Senior Management

listen to the local expertise the people have to offer
do not try to force the american culture on to the new markets
involve the Uk office more into what is happening company wide

Pros

New office
Free food (mostly healthy) and fresh fruit
good location
some nice people still left
good mid peninsula location

Cons

Almost everything.

Culture of fear permeates and good people are leaving faster than new people can be hired. There was no money for raises, but plenty for a dividend. Now since so many people have left suddenly there is money for some small raises.

Advice to Senior Management

Wake up and smell the coffee (its free). Maybe Jeff should try the company coffee? Try hiring talent outside of Leapfrog and Orbitz. And just because someone was good at one of these companies doesn't mean that they will be good at a completely different job requiring a different skill set and education.

Stop restructuring and then wondering why things aren't moving fast enough. Try making money instead of just spending it. You are killing the company.

Pros

Other than somewhat decent work-life balance there are no pros of working for Nextag. The location is decent being right in the middle of the Peninsula.

Cons

Horrible management who're clueless about technology and/or the business they're supposedly going to take to the next level. Very archaic codebase which has very little chance of getting resuscitated. It needs to be killed and rewritten.

Advice to Senior Management

Instead of indulging in cheer-leading and hiring your buddies try to figure out who your good engineers are and put your best efforts in retaining them. The brand has no takers in the valley so forget about attracting good talent. Hang on to the meagre resources you still have left since you managed to lay-off/drive away a lot of your best people already. Take a close look at middle management who're not only mere pencil pushers but are incapable of leading their teams. After leaving Nextag the quality of middle managers I have come across looks like 10x better/more productive.

Pros

At Nextag, I get to work with smart people on interesting problems. The upper management has changed recently, and the company has begun to make significant changes (both technical and cultural) in a short period of time.

Cons

The San Mateo location is pretty (up on the hill off 92), but dining options are somewhat limited. The company is growing quickly, and quality talent is hard to find these days. It can take a while to bring in new people, even when they're really needed. Also, I could use more vacation time, but that's probably true most places.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to be unafraid to change. Continue treating employees like adults. This isn't my first rodeo, and the role of corporate cheerleader doesn't come naturally to me, but I think this place could really be a rocket ship. For the first time in years, I'm actually excited about a big company.

Pros

- Good, hard-working engineers.
- Easy to get more responsibility and make an individual impact.
- Freedom of speech (on Glassdoor).
- Nice, new office.
- Good work-life balance for some.

Cons

- Leapfrog is where senior management came from. Compare Leapfrog and Nextag reviews. The similarities are uncanny.
- Amazing to watch a small group of managers - Directors and above that were hired since Jan '10 - leech money from a company and contribute so little to the bottom line. Engineers and a few long time managers single-handedly keep the company afloat.
- Low morale. Good engineers mostly gone now, even the ones who were once optimistic.
- Heavy micromanagement.
- Layoffs, no raises, and impossible to hire qualified engineers.

Advice to Senior Management

Providence Equity Partners, your investment is quickly turning into Shopzilla. Huge loss! Google search for "shopzilla symphony". Compare also to Leapfrog stock performance.

Pros

Good balance between work and personal life

Cons

Bad programming practices
Management doesnt appreciate the hard work done by employes

Advice to Senior Management

Make it a more enticing place to work by providing more benefits to employees

Pros

- New office
- Supposedly willing to take bigger risks
- Some groups have champions high enough in the company to move towards better practices/tech
- Coworkers are really nice
- There are some really smart people in the company
- New technology is supposed to be in the pipeline, so engineers aren't stuck using severely outdated technology
- Tech talks about the modern stuff Nextag might have implemented one day

Cons

- Impression of cronyism (not always warranted) because of the number of people that came from leapfrog/orbitz
- Micromanagement of people through @task under the auspices of saving money on taxes, @task management now takes up a significant part of several senior engineer's time
- Code base is terrible, over 12 years of organic, unguided growth and no cleanup, it really can't be saved unless you put a lot of engineers on that task
- New technology is supposed to be in the pipeline, but hasn't seemed to have materialized yet
- Upper management doesn't actually want feedback, they want a cheering squad
- They keep saying they are moving towards "agile" development, but dismantled the most agile group in the company and ignored their recommendations
- It seems like every other person hired is a VP

Advice to Senior Management

Jeff's poorly handled response to some employees has made a lot of people really reluctant to speak up if they disagree with the direction the company is taking, maybe an anonymous place to leave feedback could be helpful. It also seems that there is a bit too much focus on making Jeff happy and not enough on making a good product. Management seems pretty out of touch with web development, in fact I think there is only one, maybe two high level people (VP and up) at the company that could actually write code.

It's probably going to be a whole new company by the end of this year, but it remains to be seen if that is a good thing.

Pros

There are still good people at the company (as of this review) in both the lower and upper levels of the company. If you have the opportunity to work with them, you can learn a lot from them and they make coming to work enjoyable. However, I would only recommend working here if you are looking for experience and don't need job stability.

Cons

There are plenty of incompetent people in the company, and if you have the misfortune of encountering them or working with them, I am truly sorry. I am not sure how these people got hired at Nextag, but sometimes I feel like we got the rejects from other companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Reward your good talent (what's left of them) and PLEASE vet your incoming candidates carefully.

Pros

The new office is nice. The people are nice. Convenient location.

Cons

I think this equation that somebody left in the comments section perfectly sums up why people are dissatisfied with Nextag and leaving in droves. To whoever wrote it, brilliant. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Threats of layoffs + No raises until 2012 = No sane person would want to stay

Advice to Senior Management

Wake up and get your company back on track! Stop spending so much money on stupid things so you won't have to resort to layoffs anymore. People work very hard and to have no raises in 2011 is a slap in the face. No one's going to stick around till 2012 to get their raise. You think people are that patient? Yet all the managers are sure to get raises on top of their already high salaries once their 360 reviews come out. Plan your money and budget better! And stop hiring managers! If we don't have the budget to even pay the employees that are already here then stop hiring high level execs, um, I mean Jeff's friends.

Pros

Decent work-life balance compared to most other Silicon Valley companies. As others have pointed out here as well free soda, coffee, etc, which is actually not that big of a deal once you see what other companies have to offer.

Cons

Atrociously incompetent top executives, middle managers only interested in doing a kiss-up kick-down job even when they know they're dead wrong. Somehow, the company developed a pressing need to hire a ton of VPs/Directors in the last 1 year and even more mysteriously they did not find any top drawer talent in companies other than the ones Jeff Katz ever worked at. To accommodate this huge pool of newly acquired stuffed suits the company decided to let go of engineering staff - some of whom had toiled hard for several years. The new management is very adept at cheer-leading but hardly any good at leading anyone. Micromanagement, pressure tactics, and a culture of fear are being promoted but are making the good engineers leave. Soon the stocks of good talent will be depleted and all that will be left would be the cheer-leading squad. A Nextag IPO is suddenly looking like an impossibility any way one looks at it. A bankruptcy appears a more likely scenario.

Advice to Senior Management

RESIGN and take your coterie with you. Turn over the reins to people who're actually built something with technology and not just hopped from one company to another all their lives! If you stay in charge of this ship any longer it will sink under the weight of your ignorance, incompetence, and hubris.