Blackhawk Network reviews

Poor management. Highly inadequate training for new hires and little direction for employees other than "sell" and "grow". Executives (new and old) get many more benefits and far more compensation than other employees and the company keeps the upper echelon small, often forcing out quality mid-level employees rather than giving competitive salaries and promotions. Execs are often MIA during normal working hours and can't be bothered to respond to emails, calls, etc. unless it affects their bottom line, even if the issue is their responsibility. Apply here if you'd like work hard to be paid at the bottom of your compensation bracket without clear prospects for advancement while watching lazy sales execs continually move up. If you're hired in the Pleasanton office they'll claim to pay competitively for a tech company in the SF Bay Area but you won't get average salary or bonus (let alone benefits like food and things that contribute to work-life balance), and you shouldn't expect equity unless you're an executive.

Where do I begin? Let me summarize into 3 categories Talent, Technology and Company culture. Talent - Very few engineers who are smart. Only a handful. Lot of them are just living in a bubble. Below mediocre engineers. Blackhawk 5 years ago before IPO had all these vendors who outsourced contrators and some of them have been converted to full time engineers and there are still some old time contractors left and they are really bad. Current managers are not managing them out and there is a lot of politics for a company like Blackhawk. Focus is not on great engineering talent. It is a financial company with engineering treated as an IT department. These engineers don't leave as they cannot find a job anywhere else. Technology - Blackhawk's business value is strong but the backbone technology is week due to these type of mediocre talent. Some really good people left the company and now it is a combination of bad management + bad engineers who just collect their paycheck. These people have no clue what is a good data structure or algorithms, how do we build truly scalable, resilient systems. They are reactive meaning they get positive cases working and then spend millions fixing scalability issues. The amount of people, time and money spent of the projects can run multiple startups for a year. Current CTO and his team are so distant from reality. They have grand vision but don't know how to execute. Certainly cannot with a team like this. This is not paypal and you need to do something more to attract good talent. Company Culture - HR department is horrible. No support for anything. Some people need to be let go in that department who have been there for years. There is no good partnership and they are always worried about getting sued. People in upper management believe everything middle management says and don't take the time to understand the reality. Bad work culture in engineering due to the above problems, no diversity, no respect for each other among developers. Only very few architects are good. Especially the ones in colorado before were so far from reality that they designed solutions without understanding the business. Not their fault, but management vision is lacking. Below market pay. Managers have to fight to reward some hardworking talented few engineers but never goes through. No investment in training of managers. Also there is a bad messaging that only way to get a promotion is to be a manager when in reality there is dual career path and managers make lesser than principal engineers. This is causing some good engineers to take management career path when they actually make bad managers. Unless things change, this is not a good place to be.