Overstock.com Reviews

Pros

Growing company; rewards results, rather than friendships.

Cons

Need to complete IT projects more quickly.

Pros

* True agile development shop. (Iterative delivery, co-located product owner, emphasis on TDD, QA embedded with Dev, daily stand-ups, CI, etc.)
* Excellent operational staff and solid rapid QA of release candidates allows one to sleep.
* Rapid growth provides lots of career advancement opportunities.
* Significant support for continuous learning.
* Honest open communication within IT (lying is grounds for immediate firing)

Cons

* Benefits package is slightly behind market.
* Not all departments are as organizationally mature as IT or have the same density of talent.

Pros

I love working for overstock great place

Cons

I have no complaints at this time.

Pros

Career advancement. Training. Knowledge. A nice work environment. An exciting place to work and great to be a part of.

Cons

Frequent organization changes (not always a bad thing though).

Pros

It can pay well, depends
Good benefits
Probably a good job at the warehouse or for customer service reps

Cons

Terrible management (some bright spots, but most leaders don't know anything about the departments they are trying to manage)
Textbook bad business practices - reorganizations constantly. You might be in a different job in 6 months that you don't want. Always a new emphasis on what is "important" - every few months it changes
They can't figure out how to make money. This is a problem eventually!!
No communication from above, if you are a mind-reader that would help you.
Promotions, lay offs, etc are all very political, not based on merit.
Obsession with competing with Amazon instead of coming up with their own ideas and strategies.
Some of the executives don't work nearly as hard as the people they manage, which is demoralizing.
There is a lot of fear - nobody wants to make a decision.

Advice to Senior Management

Have respect for experience, make sure people who are leading departments know something about the department they are leading. Unstability breeds fear, and fear isn't good in the workplace.

Pros

There are some very nice people at Overstock.com and a few who actually understand retail and have some experience outside of the company.

Cons

Patrick Byrne has insulated himself with a young, inexperienced senior leadership team that has no vision for the future. Decisions are all reactive instead of proactive and the company feels more like a vanity project for Patrick Byrne than a publicly traded company with responsibility to its shareholders. Most people with outside experience end up being unhappy because the company is so poorly managed. Ideas for improving systems, proccesses or structure are not welcome. If you want to keep you job just put your head down and do what you are told even if it is detremental to the business and creates no value for shareholders.

Advice to Senior Management

Step back and come up with a realistic vision for the future. Check your ego and learn to show some respect for your employees.

Pros

Benefits are decent. Could be better, but at least we have them. When you know the right people, management is nice to you. They give you opportunities to grow. Getting time off approved is not a problem. For the most part, management is understanding of your life outside of work.

Cons

If you don't know the right people, or if you get on their bad side, work is horrible. Only one member of senior management is actually qualified for their position. None of the other members of management have ever had any actual training, let alone a degree. People with talent at Overstock are downtrodden because management fears they will be replaced by the more qualified individuals. New ideas are shot down, especially if the person is not well liked. Opportunities for growth are based upon personal preference rather than actual abilities. When given the opportunity for growth, no support is given or additional training for skills that would be useful. Good work is almost never recognized and mistakes are blown out of proportion. Communication from management is very poor. Promises are made but never kept. Bottom line, when you have to go into work and fear for your job everyday because of what you did or did not do, it makes for a hostile work environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Get some leaders with training, or give the leaders you have training. Foster talent, don't destroy it. Make more decisions based on logic and reason rather than emotion. Respect your employees and then you will gain respect. Be more involved, make time for the people under you. Keep promises and keep perspective.

Pros

Lots of focus on customer service. Higher pay than average. Friendly enviroment when you work with people at your same level. Lots of information that can be accessed to help your learn more about various fields of business.

Cons

First off the company will give you no privacy even at home. They will micro manage you on a daily basis and even monitor your facebook pages to see what you, your friends and family talk about. Overall the company has been going in a downwards spiral. When you start your employement here you get this idea of this family friendly, understanding, open door enviroment but as you progress throughout the company you gradually learn how untrue that is. A lot of vital information is kept from the employees. Management never gives a straight answer to your questions. Job security is always an issue. The company fires a lot of people every year. Their is a lot of chaos going on behind the veil that they drape over the newer employees. Too much pressure gets put on the frontline reps to improve but no solid answers are given as to what specifically needs to improve. Lots of negative leads and managers. Quality and training seem to have lost touch with the fun and positivity that used to be a major part of their jobs. You will constantly feel stressed at work and it easily effects your home/personal life. If you move up in the company you will get less recognition and be removed from any and all fun activities. People in higher positions deter people from moving up because they are extremely unhappy with their jobs.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more prevelant in the workforce. Get new people in management positions. There are a lot of people who have hit the roof for advancement in their careers. As the company grows so should the amount of managers you have running various departments. My advice would be to have 2 managers one over specialty and one over frontline. Get some new faces in management. Provide more incentives accross the board and recognize hardwork more often. The company has always fallen behind in making people feel valued and recognizing it right away. Dont restriict certain employees from the incentives if you allow trainers, qa coaches and leads to get the awards you provide it pushes people to move up in the company and get to that position.

Pros

Going from working at Smith's food and drug to working at Overstock.com, I really must say Overstock is truly amazing! They provide you with all of the tools and resources you need to assist your customers, and allow you to do so. They are not limiting, and are sure to make it clear that your job is to advocate for the customer and make them happy. Making people happy is a job I like to do, and surely makes a job a lot easier.

Cons

Some of the days surely become repetitive. Things may get old, but there is enough room for opportunity that once things really begin to become too repetitive you can move up or move teams or do something different, its amazing. The only thing I can say I really am not super impressed by is the quality scoring system. Such a little thing can totally blow the whole score.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide more ways to recognize agents when they do a good job. Absolutely, there are several ways such as employee of the month, kudo's wall, and simple things like that, but I really think there should always be more ways that a job well done should be recognized.

Pros

Health benefits are OK
It is a great place if you are a ski bum or if you like hiking the state of Utah, or simply because you have a higher reason not to leave the state of Utah.
If you are good at selling ideas that sound good in meetings and love to have meetings from 8am to 6pm, this is the place for you. If you are crafty enough to arrange your work schedule around meetings, you can actually move from one meeting to another for a whole week, without actually performing any real job as long as you talk your way around the great projects or ideas that should be implemented and take down any new initiatives or real work done by others.
Align yourself with the VP of Merch/marketing and you are done and don't ever go against any of the buyers.

Cons

Toxic work environment, you can actually spent days without talking to anyone.
No vision of the future at the leadership level.
Every day there is a Fire drill kind of environment, where the only thing you do is take out fires (problems) and being careful not to be blamed for the causes of the problem.
Patrick Byrne made a great idea a reality, sadly most of his time, ideas and money are spent in fighting everybody else with lawsuits (wallstreet, hedge funds, gary weiss,banks etc) and talking about naked short selling, which is in fact a problem, but not the cause of Overstock's stock price decline.
So the company is headless in terms of direction and lacks vision of the future.
Retention rate of employees is very low, the average time a person stays at Overstock is close to 1 year.
There is no open communication channel from lower to upper management levels, last initiative was to set up a web interface to allow employees to voice their ideas, but the qualification process of the ideas is in the hands of the same people that truncate the communication to the decision person (Patrick Byrne).
Great place if you love to spend your time in Facebook and Youtube, just make sure you have one of those 3M screen protectors, so no one can see from the side what you are doing.
No retention strategy for talented employees.

Advice to Senior Management

There is a lot of raw talent, at Overstock due to the location close to BYU and UofU, but it is not fully used because the culture prevalent at Overstock, makes people behave as Know it All's.
Once these talented people get a hold of the business, they move to other positions leaving Overstock, without the knowledge because there is never a transition of tasks.
Once someone is gone, all the experience and knowledge is gone.