Pros
I worked at Spokeo as an Interaction Designer for about 8 months. During the first 4-5 months I had great hope for what I was working on. - The culture team here does a fantastic job. Fun events, great food and snacks, and generally trying to lift the spirits of everyone. Hats off to the culture boss, her right hand man, and the rest of those guys/gals for putting in the effort. - Good medical benefits and 401k. I never had problems working with Cigna insurance (I had their PPO option). - The HR and recruiting teams were always fun to work with. Great work by the head of HR, the associate HR, and the HR generalist (2 of whom decided to move on just recently) in handling our employee needs. The head of Recruiting are her recruiters do such thankless work in trying to hire good talent. - Some really smart folks over there. I felt like I could work collaboratively with most of them. In particular, I appreciated the depth of knowledge from folks like the head of Product Management, the lead specialist in Quality Assurance, and the front end guys in Engineering. I can tell some people are really trying to make something of the Spokeo product.
Cons
The last few months is where things totally fell apart. I realized that the founders (CEO and CTO) had already decided that they had zero confidence in my UX Director. The major reason I joined the company was to work with her because I KNEW she could build a solid UX strategy and follow through with it. So it was with great disappointment and confusion that things just didn't work out. - Nepotism, favoritism, family… It runs absolutely rampant at this company. I understand this is unavoidable because we like to hire those we trust and relationships sometimes blossom, but the internal familial relations to top management has created a whitelist/blacklist type of environment where you find people just brown-nosing to get into the good graces of the "family". Unfortunately this lends itself to fostering a toxic environment. - CEO: He's a nice guy and I don't have a problem with him personally, but he gets stuck on making well-thought-out and clear-minded decisions. I'm not saying it's an easy job at the top, but he might not actually be the right person to take on those responsibilities. For a company of this size and age, they really shouldn't be shooting from the hip on strategic planning (or lack of planning, thereof). - CTO: He's not a nice guy. Arrogant, backstabbing, and lacking of emotional intelligence. He once got upset when I tried to present ideas around conversion rates during the checkout process. I had multiple ideas and one of them happened to be an outside-the-box solution that he didn't care for. He asked me if I knew how the company worked in the middle of the meeting which just shows that he wasn't really about coming up with solutions. In addition, I've noticed a hint of his misogynistic behavior which really concerns me. This is a serious red flag that should be somehow addressed. The upper management consists of college roommates who have been running this company from the start, no doubt with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears throughout the years. They've lasted this long so there's got to be some method to their madness, right? But simply because you've been at the company the longest doesn't mean you've got the skills to lead.
