Shift Reviews

Pros

- Very pragmatic approach to software development. The engineering culture and philosophy closely resembles Google. Could be a pro or con, depending on how you see it. - Engineers work on projects that they think are impactful. - Strong technical leadership, both from individual contributors and EMs - You will learn a lot of transferrable engineering skills, especially if you are early in your career. - As an... engineer, you can have a strong say in how important something is to work on. - People work really hard and care about what they do. - Jon (VP eng), Toby (Co-CEO), and Christian (CTO) are transparent and open to new ways of thinking. - Engineers, regardless of experience, are depended on and trusted to follow through. If you are a doer, you will thrive. If you mess up, you will learn in a non-judgmental or blame-y way. - Pretty good comp, benefits, and stock options.

Cons

- Lots of growing pains of a startup. - There are often competing priorities that can be hard to balance. - Code becomes legacy very fast as the business changes rapidly (within weeks or a couple of months). This isn't necessarily bad, but it could be to some people. - The eng team is very understaffed.

Advice to Management

Don't lose sight of the mission. Let's keep being transparent with customers and not turn into an online dealership that pushes F&I products

Pros

-You can get interviewed with no prior experience, as long as you accept the low salary quoted by the recruiter in your screening call. Working here can be a good starter job if you have a solid career path in mind, and you don't intend to spend much time working at Shift before moving on to a better opportunity. -No cost health insurance is very nice, even if it's uncertain that this will remain a benefit for... employees. It was mentioned by one of the CEOs recently that this healthcare policy isn't guaranteed to remain an option down the line.

Cons

This review is about working on the sales team at Shift. Different departments within Shift have vastly different work experiences, including differences in salary, benefits packages, hours, WFH flexibility, and department organization. -Salary. Shift sales is not a tech sales job, and it definitely doesn't pay like one. You may hear buzzwords and weak attempts to market the Shift team like an inside sales team,... but in practice it functions like more of a B2C call center. -Inflexible hours. You don't get to choose your schedule, it's dictated by what the company needs. You'll get 2 off days per week, but it's unlikely that 1 will fall on a weekend, and it's impossible to have both weekend days off. There's zero opportunity to work from home. -Workload. If you're a sales rep, 60 calls or 3.5 hours of talk time per day are required by sales management. This is unrealistic and significantly higher than most other phone sales jobs, especially considering how low salary/commission payouts are at Shift. -Inexperienced and disorganized operations team, from top to bottom. Shift can optimistically be described as "figuring things out as we go." Shift sales reps often have no prior sales experience. Customer-facing field employees are underpaid, typically college students with minimal work ethic who aren't incentivized to learn about cars, or sell them. Management in sales and operations are former reps who were promoted internally, for whom it's their very first time as a manager. Let that sink in: at Shift, it is every sales manager's very first job in management. Some of the team are excelling in a leadership role, and others have a lot to learn. -Culture. Shift is a company of constant new ideas and new projects, but there's no organized or effective way of tracking and implementing these changes. The result is a wild west kind of environment where you can be bullied into compliance, and your opinion or voice ultimately doesn't matter. Your manager might ask you to take on the responsibilities of a new role or promotion right away, but your promised pay raise and title change won't be addressed for weeks or months after the fact. You might be assigned a project, work on it for a week, and then never hear it mentioned again. You might be working down a specific path to promotion laid out by your manager, but that path can vanish at a moment's notice when another new idea lands. You might have a record-breaking month where your payout on the *company-provided* commission calculator says you'll get $2,000 in commission, and when your paycheck gets deposited, you only got paid $1,000 of that. What happened? It turns out the darn commission calculator is wrong! Management takes no action besides holding a meeting to say "sorry everyone feels so bad, this was a clerical error and we'll fix the calculator. We're not going to honor what you were expecting, or even pay out anywhere in the middle. But! Your commission is still really high even if it's half what you expected, so you should be happy!" The numbers aren't exact, but this is a true story and it happened very recently.

Advice to Management

-Listen to your employees. There is extremely high turnover on the sales team right now, from a combination of layoffs and reps quitting. It seems like management's philosophy is to ignore low morale, never mention the employees who quit, and gaslight the rest of the team into thinking everything is business as usual. Morale is low for a reason, and ignoring the roots of the problem will only make things worse down... the line. -To the CEOs: Be effective. Shift has gone through several changes in its business model, in order to try and figure out how to become profitable. A side effect of this is that everyone at the company has a different vision of what Shift is, and what Shift is working toward. An engineer will tell you that it's about building a concierge car-buying experience, totally different than a stereotypical dealership. A sales rep will tell you we're the same as a dealership, but online. You get the idea. If you know what direction you want to take your company, share that with your employees. It's your jobs as co-CEOs to establish a vision and motivate your workforce to get there with a set of common goals. As of today, you're not doing that successfully.

Pros

Shift gives great opportunities to start your career.

Cons

Fairly disorganized from top to bottom, lots of growing pains when I came and lots more to get through yet still.

Pros

- Extremely high caliber engineering department; in the 6~ months I've been here, I've grown my engineering expertise twice over. - Toby (Co-CEO) is very transparent and regularly interacts with the Engineering team - Tons of opportunity for growth in just about any way imaginable. It's a startup; if you're hungry, there are ways for you to make an impact and to demonstrate value in high visibility ways. - The... speed of development makes work as a software engineer very motivating. After work is dev-complete, it's in production less than an hour later. - Small perks are nice (daily lunch stipend, office snacks/drinks, $50 toward phone bill every month) - Quarterly trips out to SF are fun - Still small enough to receive a decent chunk of equity - Flex PTO policy - Very reasonable work hours for a startup (typically 45~ hours a week) - Flexible about remote work

Cons

- Bicoastal (East coasters can sometimes be an afterthought). Scheduling across a three hour time difference can sometimes be painful. - No 401(k) matching program - More work than play; not many activities or team events outside of work and when you're at work, you work.

Advice to Management

- Continue being transparent about the state of Shift wrt investors and our business prospects and road map. - Don't become a top-down company. Some recent road mapping has been almost exclusively top-down; engineers (and our people in the field) are paying attention and are close to our biggest problems and have great insights about how to solve them.

Pros

no one really takes care of you.

Cons

Some people are awfully unprofessional

Pros

* Fantastic, smart, caring, and engaged team * positive business outlook * is working towards going public, not staying private for as long as possible like other startups * Great career development opportunities since business is at the stage where it's growing and maturing * A workplace that really cares about its employees * Interesting, new(er) tech stack * Fast-paced, always impactful work * Values... transparency, never feels like us vs. them * Growing team

Cons

* work-life balance, (I actually find this to be a pro since co-workers work hard, but some people may not like this) * illiquid stock right now * business requires heavy capital investment * No bonuses Most cons are due to Shift being a startup, and I'm sure most of these will fade over time as the company grows.

Advice to Management

* Keep up the good work and guide us towards success! * Share more longer-term plans

Pros

culture, great & brilliant co-workers, benefits

Cons

Go, prioritization in flux (but it's a startup)

Pros

Great team culture and plenty of opportunities to learn and grow in the role you want to

Cons

Typical woes associated with a start-up