WideOrbit Work Life Balance FAQ

Pros

Pay is above average, internal promotions, excellent perks, flexible remote working options, colleagues are kind and eager to help, fun culture with monthly outings,

Cons

New health insurance isn't as good as the old health insurance

Advice to Management

Keep focusing on keeping team members trained/informed on latest changes

Pros

Good work/life balance, flexible schedule and commute options. Co-workers.

Cons

Most departments act independently from each other. This creates multiple silos in the company as well as creating multiple competing requests which sets you up for failure. Most technical decisions are driven by politics and not requirements.

Advice to Management

Stop practicing an Autocratic leadership style. Enable and empower individual contributors who are capable to make and employ change from the bottom up. Provide a way for employees to give unsolicited feedback for all levels of the managers in their department without fear of retribution. Hire managers and leaders from outside the company who have experience growing a company and providing services at scale. Have managers focus on management, leadership, and career development instead of doing Individual contributor work.

Pros

The team is relatively small, but it's part of a medium-sized company. So you have lots of opportunity yet more stability than a start up. Great place for full-stack developers, or to learn to become full-stack. The office is pretty quiet and everyone gets along and works well together. Benefits and salary are competitive and time off is more generous than most other companies. Work-life balance is pretty good as well -- there's not a ton of overtime and most managers are flexible with personal obligations and appointments.

Cons

Since it's not a big company, it can't really compete with big players in the market in regards to signing bonuses, stock options, and end of year bonuses. Also, the higher up you advance the more likely you are to work more overtime.

Pros

WideOrbit has all but completed the take over of the broadcast/network/radio traffic software spaces in the US and Canada. It is not a startup. It has created the most valuable software code base for these industries, and it built it on top of proven technologies that work (C++, Delphi, SQL Server, MySQL, Hadoop, C#, ActiveScript). This is important in a corporate world where running reliable/stable software is critical to generate revenue. WideOrbit understands their niche and builds software that traffics billions of dollars in spots a year. As developers, We all would love to work with the most bleeding edge, buzzword rich tech in a glamorous social media setting, there is limited room to do that at WO. What you do get instead, is the opportunity to work with friendly, smart people on well defined problems, for customers that positively love your product, and be paid at a higher than market rate, enjoy great vacation benefits (4-5wk sabbaticals) and flexible working arrangements. For that "shiny object" itch, you are provided with access to online training and are free to indulge your interests.

Cons

WideOrbit suffers from a lack of a clear on boarding process. This is a common complaint and it is real. New hires are sometimes confused as to where to go to acquire domain knowledge or what they are expected to know. We make up somewhat by *everyone* at the whole company being accessible and open to answer questions. WideOrbit has forgotten what their core business really is. The digital effort has not panned out so far, and our vision of selling media programmatically has had poor reception from our customers.

Advice to Management

Focus on your core products and shed the non relevant, non performing projects. Also, We have built you best in class products that have no real competition, price them better.