TrueCar Reviews

Cons

As with other companies like TrueCar, there is constant change. If you can’t handle it, don’t work in this industry.

Cons

Be skeptical of positive reviews written on here from 2018 onward.

TrueCar culture, already bad, became toxic in 2018. This trickled down from the top. Rather than confirming/denying rumors, leadership allows misinformation to spread. Top talent at the company took jobs elsewhere. This began in late 2017, and ramped up in 2018 when everyone realized that things were only getting worse.

“Unlimited PTO” is not present here, and leadership laughs about it. If you don’t infiltrate the elite circle of white bros, you are replaceable, and the powers-that-be will not hesitate to drop you in a heartbeat.

There’s a reason why there are so many negative reviews… I’d think long and hard before accepting a position here.

Cons

Bad management, inexperienced leadership, too clicky, and no career growth.

Cons

- Terrible office culture all around
- Weak programmers and a bottom-feeder platform
- Not a single person in a leadership role who inspires confidence ANYWHERE in the company. And all the "worker bees" see this and resent it
- It's a second-rate talent tech company that is mediocre all-across
- Stock price has decrease about 75% since I have been there, and continues to plummet as CarGurus goes up.
- Awful HR, I never had a development program or honest review, but they hire lots of unqualified managers in both product and business lines who mostly drink at local bars and make awful business decisions while we are still working in the office

Cons

communication on updates and changes needs to be better. do not turn into autotrader.

Cons

No cons as of right now

Cons

In my time there, Truecar never really had a strong tech and/or product leader. It's currently being run by inexperienced acquihires from a smaller, less-relevant company that was going under. Unfortunately their poor decision making and lack of experience has painfully shown in a record number of people leaving.

Record, numbers. I know you see/hear this a lot on Glassdoor for various companies with poor cultures, but in my entire career I have never seen such a voluntary exodus of talent relative to the size of the department/company.

There's a severe... severe... severe... lack of consideration to diversity within management. Everyone is white, and everyone is within this inner circle of acquihires. Every... one. It's gotten so obvious, that even the other white people have been vocally uncomfortable about the optics of it all. It's evolved to the point where we used to just hopelessly joke about it, because what else can you do?

As written in another review, it's a bad sign when your own HR department is writing scathing reviews about the company. I felt bad because i used to see HR people constantly behind closed-door exit meetings. I can only imagine how that wears you down to always have to bear the brunt of the poor leadership.

No mobility in career. Titles at truecar do NOT indicate ability or aptitude. They're essentially awarded to coincide with whatever your pay scale is. I've seen VP's there only have 1 direct report, directors have none.

While the CEO seems to have done a good job for what he was hired for and has generally received good ratings, at this point the lack of intervention to help fix the culture and leader issues for the other c-levels has to be factored into that opinion.

Cons

- Company is being made irrelevant by competitors run by smarter people with a better product; TrueCar is getting by as a fairly well-paying employer of almost last resort that happens to be located in Santa Monica and survives by having a few old partnerships with companies that clearly don't need TrueCar. From a product standpoint, most of your time will be spent doing silly things for these partner companies, or pointless things for TrueCar's lousy stand-alone platform. And you will have completely inadequate resources to do these things, with completely unfocused requests, while the company can't decide if they want to make car buyers or car dealers happy.

- Fairly long hours spent inefficiently on collectively low-quality work; poor work-life balance considering how unimportant and low-impact TrueCar is in both e-commerce and in auto retailing. Kind of a culture of seeing who can stay in the office the longest while actually doing nothing important or innovative. Worse places, sure, but few combine mediocrity with these hours.

- A really laughable core product that looks like an e-commerce suite from 2005 and has remained virtually unchanged for years, despite noisy initiatives to take us to 2010 e-commerce levels without the resources to do so.

- Second-tier, immature "tech bros" and older, confused AutoTrader.com veterans make for uniquely awful leadership and internal experience. A weird combination of totally inadequate leaders who cannot run anything important mixed with people who should be selling cars at dealerships (and a weird amount of people who previously did second-tier finance or accounting jobs now in important operational and product positions). No wonder there is a different leader of HR almost every quarter as it would have been hard to design a worse combination of collective leadership if you tried. Also, feel free to mix in a minority or female in a real leadership role on occasion, its not the 1950s anymore.

- Culture of paranoia and inferiority-complexes on the product side; culture of paranoia, inferiority-complexes, micromanagement, immaturity and meaningless reports on the business side. Aside from the CEO, I have encountered perhaps two or three "star performers" or even effective leaders at the Director level or above. Some good product people, but often led by people who have no business there and were a favorite of some executive who knows no better.

- The CEO means well and is a definite step up from the immature leadership of the founders, but seems about 20 years behind the curve. It feels like we are an AOL dial-up era tech company with a auto dealer network.

- Having a few executives sell MILLIONS of dollars in stock options right before our stock plummeted was kind of a bad look. Also, I've lost track of how many VPs, Directors and even founders have resigned in the last year or so...

- Weird organizational structure with VPs and Directors who don't have a single direct report, and other leftovers from the founding era and a tiny, bankrupt acquired company that are leading things they clearly can't manage well. Net result is low morale, secrecy, lack of transparency, and high turnover. Definitely no focus, aside from all the core values crap they once slapped on the walls.

- Hard to find a real pro in the office, or anyone who is into impartial and honest development of their employees. They don't do regular feedback here, they do blindside accusations that have crushed many of my coworkers. It seems nobody in leadership here has accomplished anything but building hype about a crappy tech product (aside from the CEO, who did his thing well before the Iphone was invented).

- While I don't work for them directly, it seems some of the other business groups here ( like operations, partner, accounting) are extremely micromanaged and stale, and lose/fire lots of talented people while keeping yes men who can crank out powerpoints to pat each other on the back with (and confuse product with). Lots of power and attention is placed in the auto-dealer group, which are good guys but as far removed from tech as possible. None of this mixes well. Judging by the stock price, maybe that strategy isn't working so well.

- Unhelpful culture; pockets of good people mostly led by passive-aggressive arrogant people who wouldn't be able to cut it anywhere else, yet act like they are at Google (minus the whole world-class excellence and hard-driving growth and accountability part). HR is completely untrustworthy. Hard to believe this company has been around for 13 years, given how amateur it seems in almost every respect. I've never been at a place with more undeserved arrogance.

Cons

HR has the worst Glint survey results of the entire company.

The HR department can't seem to keep a leader and have been through 5 CHROs in the last 4 years. They've got too many 'delegators' and not enough 'do-ers'. Without strong leadership, the HR team has cultivated a culture of finger pointing and throwing others under the bus to preserve their own reputations.

There are pockets of positive work environments at TC, but the HR team is not one of them.

Cons

If you want to work just for the money, have to deal with politics and spend your time on a brand that is at the bottom of the market, you should join the team here.

Any review can be done by someone who had a bad eval or something like that, so let me give you some estimated numbers/facts.

Since I started at TrueCar:

-New CFO, CPO left, two SVPs have left, 3 directors have left.

-Another two VPs are leaving in the next 3-4 months (announced)

-Last year, the total number of just product/tech people that have left is around 25-30%. This not an exaggeration, it was announced by HR. We were told that most of these "we wanted gone". I'd beg to differ and it shows you how incompetent this company is.

Not convinced?

-Budget is very difficult to get here. The company is doing so poorly that any amount requested has to wait for the next QTR to help ease expense on the current one.

-Leadership is very bad. Zero strategy, product is years behind, favoritism. You name it.

-On this note, there are many who have a title/role they are nowhere near qualified for.

-The people they are bringing in to lead departments are mostly talking heads. Some of them are coming into the organization from day one and trying to tell everyone how to do their jobs. I haven't been directly impacted, but I know people who are on the way out (by choice) because of it.

I implore you to look at financial statements/earnings and listen to the calls. Then go and listen to the competition. That will tell you all you need to know.

In summary: lots of bad change, lots of politics, and no innovation. This is the worst company I have been employed at and I will not be employed here much longer.