InMobi Reviews

Cons

Can't think of anything right now

Cons

Can't think of any con

Cons

The disaster was within upper management. Indian work culture pushed into the US, suspect executives that lack contribution, mass firings that gutted the office work force by 50-60%.

Cons

A great deal of turnover

Cons

There is no cons as such

Cons

Culture encourages self promotion and saying yes at all costs

Cons

Quality of new recruitments reduced drastically

Cons

Middle management can deter your growth

Cons

- Middle management can be a bottleneck

Cons

- Awful, awful culture in the US office. Working here was a pretty eye-opening experience in how not to hire and how not to manage people.

- The time zone difference between SF and HQ in Bangalore is a beast, either 12.5 or 13.5 hours depending on time of year. Unless you're willing to stay up in the middle of the night, you have a couple hours in the evening and maybe a couple in the morning (if Indian co-workers are willing to work late-night on their end).

- Communication is broadly poor. Non-exec personnel rarely travel from Bangalore to SF (even less in the other direction) and educational sessions on new developments happen at 3 AM PST, opening up a ever-widening knowledge gaps. Major product changes are pushed out without consulting teams relying on the product, servers are deprecated without sufficient notice to stakeholders, etc.

- Execution is weak with lack of accountability. Across the board, output is sloppy. When (not if) things go wrong, folks are often more concerned with passing the blame than fixing the problem.

- Speaking of fixing problems, it doesn't happen. The culture is broadly reactive rather than proactive. Teams run into the same problems over and over again, and no one ever takes a step back to assess and address underlying issues. They attack the symptoms furiously but ignore the root cause. And they don't even attack the symptoms that well. Consistent but non-catastrophic problems hampering productivity are ignored. Catastrophic problems get duct-taped back together rather than actually fixed, complicating future releases.

- US teams do not have nearly enough autonomy. Far too often something breaks and only Bangalore has either the ability or authority to fix it. Simple tasks on new products might take special back-end access that only one engineer in Bangalore has. If you need to fire it while that person's asleep... tough.

- There's a bias towards throwing more man-hours at repetitive tasks and pain points, rather than implementing effective automation or improving tools. Smart people devote too much time on mundane tasks because workflow isn't streamlined, damaging morale, engagement, and retention.

- Headcount is bloated, with too many incompetent middle managers. Significant personnel redundancies in some areas and not nearly enough resources in others. Far too many people have the attitude of "not my problem", and a shocking number will deny a problem even exists (apparently "cannot replicate issue" means the issue doesn't exist). You'll constantly have to hunt down the person who can solve your issue and then bombard that person with a stream of follow-up emails to get them to do their job.

- On the flipside, people at times get overzealous and try to tackle issues outside their competency. Numerous times folks escalated minor problems they didn't understand, portraying minor hiccups as p0 issues, actively making those problems more difficult to manage, and making it harder to get resources for future problems.

- There's an institutional resistance to change. I've spoken with folks who worked at InMobi before my time and they were staggeringly consistent in their complaints.

- You end up with a perfect storm that manages to be both chaotic and bureaucratic. Avoidable fire drills are common. Minor requests turn into multi-day ordeals, because small confusion holds up progress, folks lack the initiative and/or authority to make calls, and you have small daily windows for India to get status updates. Major requests turn into insane rabbit holes with emails ever growing list of people added to email threads, constant passing of the buck, and countless hounding follow-up emails. Startup chaos is fine if teams are empowered to take initiative and attack issues as they arise; bloated corporate bureaucracy is manageable if it provides clarity, standardizes processes, and lessens stress. Fostering a chaotic environment while maintaining structural barriers to getting things done is really the worst possible outcome.

- People are treated as fungible. Layoffs and the like are not handled well. The talented colleagues I liked and respected generally churned out pretty quick, let go, or had one foot out of the door. The ones who stay are stuck because of their visa situation or grossly overpaid and riding things out.

- Fundamentally, the work's not that meaningful. This reflects on the broader adtech industry more than InMobi specifically-- the number of people who've told me they need to get out of adtech is staggering. But even if you're working in a BS industry, it's nice to win and feel like your employer gives a crap about you.