Avalara Reviews

Cons

It's not a call center enviornment and no it's not telemarketing either, but you are required to put in work. You only get back what you put in! And I'm not one to complain about that.

Cons

* Rampant nepotism creates an atmosphere of back-stabbing.
* Leave your integrity and ethics at the door. Regional executive was more interested in bottom-line numbers than providing quality services for clients. Staff was instructed to send incomplete, inaccurate or unprofessional work to clients in order to pad the balance sheet. Unsubstantiated conclusions were included in reports without citing sources.
* Misogyny and favoritism was overwhelming. One worker arrived whenever it was convenient for her (it was probably a coincidence that her thong was exposed every day). Execs used to joke during onboarding that her hours were "whenever she felt like arriving." A friend was hired and showered with perks: his own office, took him to lunch multiple times a week, extended time to learn the system without any productivity requirements. The friend resigned before making a significant contribution.
* Supervisors were crude and unprofessional. One would disappear for "lunch" with friends (translation: he would go out for drinks). A supervisor insinuated that he slept with one of his managers while at a meeting in Washington. A supervisor passed out at his desk after an office party where he made margaritas.
* Upper management was not interested in knowing what happened in Rocklin. HR said CEO would reach out after Washington was notified of the situation in California. No follow-up was ever done.
* Micromanagerial policies were implemented requiring a morning meeting laying out the working expectations for the day, a follow-up email chart documenting the work discussed at the meeting, and documenting the completed work on the emailed chart at the day's end. The meetings, charts, and emails wasted 30-45 minutes each day. It felt like a law office documenting billable time.

Cons

Poor leadership in the inside sales department, poor pay structure, and did I mention poor management in the inside sales department

Cons

The company has zero engineering culture and does not at all respect engineers's decisions and ideas in the ways a technology company should. Standards aren't high enough, tech debt is un sustainable including 2 years to rewrite one of the main components of the product. These tech debt issues are not at all either understood or taken seriously by senior management.

Petty politics between people who have no technical background running departments like QA. All in all the company is a small cliquish company that has no ability or understanding of collaboration.

Career development, even in engineering, is non-existent.

Zero bonus.

Almost no opportunity for growth (or management doesn't understand how to make it happen).

And, again, I'll reiterate a complete misunderstanding of how collaboration should work. Collaboration, discussion, and debate are ___ESSENTIAL__ to a productive environment. People should not get defensive over things like that and rather should be encouraged. Otherwise every product that comes out will be substandard.

Cons

lies lies lies false promises incompetent lies lies lies lies poor management Scott needs to leave the company before running completely in the ground

Cons

Compensation, benefits, upper management

Cons

Usual operational challenges due to growth. Requires passionate people given the lofty goals so not for the faint of heart.

Cons

Issues with talent retention.

Cons

Culture of overwork, communication issues between teams with such fast growth, management struggles to maintain consistent direction that allows you to feel you accomplished something

Cons

Worst micro-management I've ever experienced. Which might not be SO bad if the sales managers actually knew what they were doing. Completely clueless. Their entire philosophy is "dial more numbers", "send more emails" and by default, you'll just magically make more money. A couple years ago, the company thought they were growing a lot faster than they really were and over hired sales reps. By a long shot. The entire sales organization has been struggling ever since. They had to let a bunch of people go, and created new (worthless) positions for other people they didn't want to can right there on the spot. But ultimately, it was a position where management hoped people would just weed themselves out. It worked. People were quitting left and right, while those that hung on (miserably) were given more and more restrictions, month after month, systematically guaranteeing their failure. Then they hold "team meetings" where managers berate their entire team for missing quota. If anyone mentioned the restrictions and how they made it very challenging to hit quota, they would literally get screamed at and told to "find employment elsewhere, if you don't like it". On top of that, we were consistently given fake leads then we would get yelled at for "not working them". We were trying to sell sales tax calculation software, but we were expected to work leads for non-profit organizations, government entities, utility companies, and a laundry list of other businesses that had no use for our software. For the handful of leads that were actually good, the majority would say they weren't interested, then their contact information would go into a list that was called ad emailed over and over, day in and day out by two dozen desperate sales people, until they demanded we never call again, blocked our phone numbers, and registered our email domain as spam. If people asked me what I did for a living, I literally told them I was a telemarketer. Morale couldn't possibly get any lower across the entire sales team.There are a few "superstars" there, who are force fed all the high quality, big $$ opportunities and are raking in the cash. But they are drinking buddies in the "good ol' boy club" with upper management. If you don't spend all your "free time" (what little is given to you) drinking and partying with upper management, then you are just given the leftover scraps that the managers BFF's couldn't close. While these few sales reps are blowing their numbers out of the water, the entire rest of the sales force was struggling to even come close to quota. Customers were constantly furious, because they were sold products they didn't want or need, but were sold them at a highly discounted rate and the only way to get the "great deal" was to purchase multiple products as a "bundle package". Everything would seem great, and we'd get them into this fully automated system, then when their automatic renewal comes around, their cost for using the products would increase 200%. Customers would be irate and threaten to cancel, but it was so difficult to undo the automation, and go back to a manual process, that they were practically stuck with the product. Either pay full price, or cancel and deal with months of difficult work to undo everything and get back to the manual process and get your books back in order. I could go on and on about all the cons and negativity, but you can just scroll down through all the other reviews to see everything else that's wrong with this company. As stated many times before, the majority of the positive reviews are clearly fake.