- Compensation is way below market rate - especially for non-Canadian employees (side note - if you’re a company that hires internationally, don’t spit in your international employees’ faces and pretend you know market conditions in their own country better than they do) - but the “People & Culture” department will gaslight you using vague metrics into convincing you that it is. Anecdote - I make at ScalePad currently roughly the same I was making five years ago.
- No cost-of-living compensation adjustment for 2024 - company wide. Meanwhile, ScalePad has been hiring folks left in right in positions such as “Market Development Representative” (at least five in the last three months alone) - this is a company hiring heavily in Sales, trying to squeeze as much as possible out of clients while neglecting current employees. The abysmal pay increases have been echoed to me by mid-tier and senior employees - even they recognize ScalePad does everything it can to keep compensation as low as possible. When I first joined, I remember being asked by a senior employee on my team - “why did you take (presumably) a pay cut to work here?” - man, I don’t even know.
- Anecdotal - I’ve experienced on more than one occasion from co-workers (some on my team, some not) - a weird passive-aggressiveness - oh, you’re running behind on a meeting with a co-worker? Expect a message from your own manager (who isn’t even in said meeting) reminding you of it because said co-worker couldn’t be bothered to Slack message you directly. It feels like I’m being “tattled” on by my co-workers - we aren’t five - you don’t have to go “tell mommy/daddy” for every little mistake. Co-worker has a problem with something you did? Expect to hear it in your next manager 1-1 instead of being asked to have a conversation about it. This echoes some other sentiments shared here - expect co-workers who are "friendly" to your face, but will be happy to backstab or throw you under the bus.
- Anecdotal - I’ve experienced on more than one occasion a general fear of having to “cover your butt” at all possible times - oh did another co-worker say it was "okay" to do something in the code? Get it in writing before you push that code or have them explicitly approve the MR. I get it - you need to look out for yourself and not blindly trust other people - but it doesn’t do a heck of a lot for employee trust when you have people who have worked at ScalePad for years telling you to take precautions like that.
- ScalePad calling HR “People & Culture” instead is following a trend in tech to rebrand Human Resources from benefits, comp, employee relations, performance management, etc. down to culture events and happy hours - they love doing irrelevant things such as slapping corporate buzzwords in front of terms to make them sound better - “performance review? No! Kaizen review!” (by the way, that’s a complete misuse of the term Kaizen - you can’t just take namesake from Japanese ideology because it sounds good), calling offices “studios”, insisting that customers are called “partners” - and don’t even get me started on the mottos - “#buildtrust! #betterway! #masterfulexperience! #enjoytheride!” - “we’re all Rocketeers!” - give me a break - we’re adults, not kids in grade 3 (I guess the P&C dept. has to prove their worth somehow.)
- As a company, ScalePad tries very hard to turn the remote experience into a diluted version of being in the office - a common trend on engineering teams is to work in your “Zoom Hub” - an all-day Zoom meeting, getting distracted from your co-workers irrelevant conversations, being asked to do something at the drop of a hat - ScalePad brands this as “like being in the office!” but disregards that remote work is inherently asynchronous. If you don't thrive on focus time and like being shoehorned into day-long meetings that some self-righteous engineering manager thought would be an excellent idea - then this is the place for you!
- Teams (especially in engineering) are very heavy on “bureaucratic project management processes” - I’ve worked on agile/scrum teams before and absolutely not a single place I’ve worked has put as heavy of an emphasis on “sprint demos”, “sprint planning”, “backlog pruning”, “quarterly retrospectives”, etc… Those all sound great on paper, but I don’t want to play “project manager” all day (especially when all of those scrum/agile “ceremonies” provide little benefit) - I’m here to get work done, not play “pretend” project manager to make upper management feel special.
- ScalePad is just another company that’s eventually going to be gutted by venture capital once it no longer makes enough.
- Top Down Ventures (ScalePad’s parent company) - has been acquiring smaller companies left and right (Backup Radar, ControlMap, Quoter), smashing them into the ScalePad portfolio and hoping for the best. ScalePad is a company that has expanded too rapidly - acquiring products that weren’t at a proper maturity level to be acquired just because they felt like they had to “out-do competitors”, and is now experiencing growing pains because of it. You can’t just acquire five new companies over the course of a few years, stretching engineering teams thin as they attempt to homogenize this mis-mash of product lineups, and expect the best.
- MSPs generally either love ScalePad products or hate them - the latter of which use them only because switching costs are too high or there are no better alternatives. A quick search of Reddit shows MSPs hate ScalePad’s pushy sales tactics (hmm, gotta give all those new Market Development Representatives something to do, eh?) and are annoyed by the price increases year after year. ScalePad loves to tout how “partner focused” they are, while continuing to alienate those same customers because it’s only focused on the bottom line.
