TechSmith Reviews

Cons

Employees would usually need relocating. The campus is an very odd location in a small town most people don't know about.

Cons

No cons. I wish they had a cold brew machine!

Cons

- I wish there was more pair programming
- At times there are redundant meetings

Cons

The sales team is evolving and changing, and as of Q2 2018 it isn't where it should be.
Salaries are ok but commissions are embarrassing. Senior leadership thinks the salaries should be enough. Commission structure is also designed to pay out less and less every year. It is based on a growth model. So if you have a great quarter and add 50% to your number, you wont get paid even one cent in commission next year if you hit the same number again. It is an extremely aggressive compounding growth commission model that is very unrealistic. No sales person/company can expect double digit growth every single year. At least not a company that has been around for 30 years. Hopefully this will change. The good sales people are leaving.

The titles also aren't the most accurate. Yes - the team is inside. But there is not an outside team they are supporting. The inside team is hunting and closing large enterprise level deals and not getting paid on it either due to low caps or extremely high comparables from last year.

Sales focus is on resellers. If resellers are the focus, then where does that leave the internal sales team? Something to really think about....

As Microsoft improves on the snipping tool, more and more accounts are dropping Snagit. My fear is that one recession or market drop would cause companies to stop their renewal of Snagit as a luxury alternative to snipping tool. Thankfully, customers REALLY like Snagit and get mad if IT takes it away. But how long will this last?

Cons

Nothing really negative worth mentioning here.

Cons

Seems to be little focus on anything that isn't Snagit or Camtasia

Cons

While I'm giving TechSmith a generally positive review, I think there are a lot of cons and gotchas when working here, speaking as a developer.

Like many orgs, TechSmith tends to do a very poor job evaluating employees, and recognizing consistent talent and hard work. In my case, this has led to some bitterness at times. For instance, in a past year, there was a very large, very selective bonus given out to select employees, to be picked by managers. When I calmly but firmly asked my manager why I didn't receive one of these, and what I could do in the future to receive one, I was given an answer along the lines of "You did great this year, but I dunno, it was a hard decision, I just had to pick someone". This is crushing to morale, and all too representative of how performance is normally evaluated. There were weeks when I worked 50+ hours tackling hard problems while some coworkers worked 30 while skating by, and nobody seemed to notice or care. There's been a recent development of a "career development guide" for systematically getting feedback from your peers, and while I think this is a step in the right direction, I'm not sure if this solves most of my complaints. Managers should be able to give direct, candid performance feedback, and draw clear lines between performance and compensation, but this seems to happen rarely at TechSmith. For the past few months or so, there have been "employee recognitions" every monday by the CEO, and while I appreciate the sentiment, they are very spotty and, in my experience, not always representative of the daily, consistent hard work of employees that care about doing their best.

Along those lines, engineers that are recognized one way or another as higher performers are pushed into roles/positions, often with misleading titles and explanations, and pressed more and more til some of them burn out. New roles come with a pile of nebulous ever-changing responsibility, with no clear guidance on how to perform well in them, and no clear feedback on whether or not that's being accomplished. And of course, you may be expected to operate in this new high-stress role for years without any actual promotion, because roles aren't positions, and you should just be thankful for the opportunity to be more involved.

Every 3-6 months, there's "The New Thing” in the organization that's gonna fix the problems with "The Last Thing". Whether it's management structure, development processes, engineering priorities, or team organization, you can be sure there will be some sort of radical shift in the organization every few months. Mid-upper level managers tout this as "trying to continuously improve", which sounds noble at first, but eventually starts to sound more and more like a hollow excuse. There's rarely any real acknowledgement that the last thing failed or what we learned from it, just a sudden shift to the new thing to fix all our problems. As one coworker put it, this leads to "re-org fatigue". Ideas and philosophies that were touted as indisputable fact 3 months ago are scoffed at, only to be reinvigorated in another 3 months. Engineering teams experience constant whiplash (and, yes, fatigue) as they try to maintain stable norms and processes so they can get work done, while trying to stay afloat in the constant churn. Despite the often-parroted line about nothing being beyond question, if you question The Latest Thing in any more than a superficial way, you risk being labeled disruptive. Our latest New Thing, combined with an inconsistently zealous application of Scrum, leaves some engineers feeling micromanaged or burnt out on process.

Innovation has somewhat stagnated. We work in an area where our customers expect a lot, and more and more advanced features are simply table stakes. While TechSmith used to be a leader in innovating, it feels more and more like we are trying to keep up. This worries me about the future of the company.

On the positive side, I think some of the above things are being tangibly addressed by the new CEO and new upper-level management, but only to some extent.

A coworker recently mentioned Conway's Law, which basically says that organizations tend to produce software that reflects the organization itself. I think that's true of TechSmith - friendly, polished, and even sometimes delightful on the surface, but chaotic and problematic beneath.

Cons

Sometimes it seems that middle management doesn't listen to feedback from the engineering staff. Maybe they know something we don't, but they don't do a great job of communicating that to us when our feedback is seemingly ignored.

Cons

Despite some incredibly liberal policies regarding attendance, dress code, etc., management hasn't yet embraced the idea of more flexible work schedules. I would love the opportunity to work four 10-hour days with Fridays off, for example.

Cons

The area isn't known for terribly high salaries