Not a great place to work - Software Engineer Fandom Employee Review

Look no further than the passive aggressive (or just aggressive) responses from the CPO on previous reviews if you’d like a snapshot of what much of leadership is like at Fandom. Leadership is now asking for Glassdoor reviews in All Hands, emails, and sometimes when positive things are said about the company on Slack. Many of the recent positive reviews are from employees in sales and marketing that have been asked to leave a review. As far as I can tell, things are mostly fine for them. Be sure to look at reviews for your department before working here. Several brand new engineers were also asked to leave a review, which they did (with 5 stars). In my opinion, a month or two isn’t a sufficient time to get a feel for how a company is operating, especially during these remote work times. The Huntsville office had almost zero turnover for years leading up to Fandom acquiring us. More than 50% of the Huntsville office has now quit (or been fired) since the acquisition in January 2019, with almost all of it taking place in the last 6 months. We’ve lost a large portion of the engineers that built DDB and had the deep knowledge of the codebase. These departures aren’t limited to the Huntsville office. Leadership initially framed the turnover as an occasional person leaving due to them finding a new awesome opportunity, but after the trickle of people leaving turned into a flood, they stopped acknowledging the departures unless directly asked. Key people with strong performance reviews put in their notice and there was no attempt to keep them or even a conversation from anyone in management. Compensation in Huntsville was not competitive, nor was it even among job roles. People with the same title and role could have a salary differential of more than $20k. The company may be addressing this in 2021, but it isn’t known what salary data they’ll be using to determine if pay is competitive. If you only look at the general Huntsville market, Fandom pays better than many of the government contractors in town. If you look at the smaller startups and more tech heavy companies, we aren’t very competitive. Failure to acknowledge failure. At least a few of our recent features have had very poor performance after release. These features were created on a whim, without any real research or data backing the decisions. The performance metrics aren’t even coming close to most of the goals that were set. Instead of acknowledging this and learning from what went wrong, we ignore the goals and label them “a great platform for experimentation”. Employees are encouraged to raise issues with their managers, but should be wary about doing so. Despite being told that there will be no retribution for speaking up, people have been punished. Employees have also been pulled into meetings with HR about their negativity. If you are still here at Fandom, be very careful about who you talk to if you are unhappy. The CTO has repeatedly told unhappy people to leave the company and that they won’t see the change they want. Leadership seems to hire their friends into other key leadership roles rather than promoting qualified candidates from within. Very limited diversity among the regular employees, with some diversity in leadership. Lack of tangible reward for exceptional performance. The bonus given to people with okay reviews this year in lieu of raises doesn’t count. Multiple surprise layoffs, even before COVID. Layoffs of people on maternity leave. Leadership told US employees how much cheaper labor is in Poland. There are a growing number of engineering contractors working on high-impact areas of products. New hires have failed portions of the interview and lack experience in critical areas, but are still hired into senior positions to get a warm body in a seat. Very limited action taken based on feedback from our quarterly pulse surveys. The leadership section of the survey was one of the lowest-scoring areas until the section was removed entirely.