Blackhawk Network Employee Reviews about "upper management"

Pros

1. Flex hours 2. Getting into a lot of new ideas of payments to pivot the company to a Payment company 3. Good people/colleagues

Cons

1. Low pay, no bonus below Director level, no RSUs since company got privately acquired by SilverLake 2. Politics at upper level management 2. Strategy on where should the company invest in and spend time on is very unclear

Pros

This company does try to provide a work life balance

Cons

lack of communication from upper management

Pros

Great right-out-of-college experience builder. Get to work with upper management from companies all over North America. Builds your resume. Always new experiences and skills to learn from people who are ready and willing to help.

Cons

Sometimes better communication between different department is needed.

Pros

Payments - Business which is currently, hot in the Market. Opportunity to learn lot of things about Payments in a short period since this is a rapid pace environment, provided if you are ready to put Hard work and of course, also depends on your sharpness. Location - No commute in Traffic!...

Cons

Managers / Directors just keep nodding their heads to the upper management and toil the developers and QAs. NO rewards or recognition for the Right people when the Technology Team is concerned. Highly Political. They don't recognize skilled people but instead they exploit them by extracting more work without recognition. Not a company for really skilled people. Skilled people have to move out of this company. Salary is far Below the Market Range.

Pros

Flexible work hours, good employees, can be a fun place to work

Cons

Compensation is well below Bay Area standards, more upper management than workers, unclear direction.

Pros

Very little. Engineers are treated as replaceable components. Was told we need a good Indian outsourcing firm.

Cons

Weak technology management who's strength is managing up. Unrealistic schedules. No RSUs or bonus program for most engineers. Coin operated upper management. Lack of integrity is astounding.

Pros

Friendly people ( not the management) . work life balance is there in some groups.

Cons

Lot of politics : Upper management hiring their ex- colleagues. poor leadership : Clearly there is no focus. lack of bonus: salary is low compared to other East bay companies. Plus no bonus. Employees are not motivated. zero career growth. If you are good in politics, you can grow for sure.

Pros

Phenomenal people to work with. Location is excellent.

Cons

Upper management needs a refresh. Pay is below par. Lots of political issues. Lots of favoritism.

Pros

Half day every 2 weeks.. that's it

Cons

Salary way below market No commission for sales just annual 'bonus' Expectancy to create new business with no reward and on top of carry out account administration and customer service daily Upper management don't care about the day-to-day for employees just want opportunities created when again, they don't have any incentive for 'sales people' Expected to work late in the Christmas period with no additional pay

Pros

East bay location, next to the freeway, good halloween party, leader in gift card space and has only one major competitor who is not as big in gift cards, lot of major banks and big retailers/brands using Blackhawk in the backend like Google, Amazon, Paypal, etc etc, Women CEO, Good office space, Flyers program for employee recognition from peers, Good strong network with all the processors.

Cons

Where do I begin? Let me summarize into 3 categories Talent, Technology and Company culture. Talent - Very few engineers who are smart. Only a handful. Lot of them are just living in a bubble. Below mediocre engineers. Blackhawk 5 years ago before IPO had all these vendors who outsourced contrators and some of them have been converted to full time engineers and there are still some old time contractors left and they are really bad. Current managers are not managing them out and there is a lot of politics for a company like Blackhawk. Focus is not on great engineering talent. It is a financial company with engineering treated as an IT department. These engineers don't leave as they cannot find a job anywhere else. Technology - Blackhawk's business value is strong but the backbone technology is week due to these type of mediocre talent. Some really good people left the company and now it is a combination of bad management + bad engineers who just collect their paycheck. These people have no clue what is a good data structure or algorithms, how do we build truly scalable, resilient systems. They are reactive meaning they get positive cases working and then spend millions fixing scalability issues. The amount of people, time and money spent of the projects can run multiple startups for a year. Current CTO and his team are so distant from reality. They have grand vision but don't know how to execute. Certainly cannot with a team like this. This is not paypal and you need to do something more to attract good talent. Company Culture - HR department is horrible. No support for anything. Some people need to be let go in that department who have been there for years. There is no good partnership and they are always worried about getting sued. People in upper management believe everything middle management says and don't take the time to understand the reality. Bad work culture in engineering due to the above problems, no diversity, no respect for each other among developers. Only very few architects are good. Especially the ones in colorado before were so far from reality that they designed solutions without understanding the business. Not their fault, but management vision is lacking. Below market pay. Managers have to fight to reward some hardworking talented few engineers but never goes through. No investment in training of managers. Also there is a bad messaging that only way to get a promotion is to be a manager when in reality there is dual career path and managers make lesser than principal engineers. This is causing some good engineers to take management career path when they actually make bad managers. Unless things change, this is not a good place to be.