Brightedge Technologies reviews

- Micro-management. I can't touch on this enough. Every single thing you do is monitored and reported on immediately. Mind you, they pitch the "same team" mentality, but for small mistakes, they'll go straight to your boss - not to you. - Constant "worldwide meetings" that teach you literally nothing about how to improve. The managers seem to think that listening to the same 3 people talking about "getting back to the basics" actually helps anyone. We know what the basics are. - As an SDR all the accounts you are given are randomized. So, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that those people exceeding goal every single week probably got the luck of the draw - though, yes they are talented and yes, you can turn no's to yeses you also CANT control people - Policies and rules that contradict each other. For example, an initiative went company-wide for SDRs about getting demos as close to the call as possible. Then they sent another one out asking for a report for all the demos set for NEXT week. So which do you want us to focus on? ASAP or next week. In practice, if you get 5 "same week" demos that report for next week is blank. So, even though you did your job you still look bad. To expand on this - there was a 5-day rule for reschedules. That being said, even if you landed an enormous company and they couldn't make it until next week - too bad. They say to ask for permission to extend it, but everyone in upper management couldn't care less about your appeal. They'll respond in a lightning-like fashion that says "I didn't even read this" - Lastly, just because someone is breaking records and doing well on paper does NOT mean they're following policy or guidelines. But then again, they're making you money so why do you care...right? (How about you listen to the calls of the people doing extremely well - you'll find some serious flaws in their practices.)

- This isn't the place to try to innovate. By this, I mean adopt anything that has become de rigeur in the industry, such as sensible configuration management, development for mobile clients, any AWS service outside of EC2 Classic, a sane build and test process, even an internal backend API to structure the website around, or event metrics to do A/B tests, etc. If you want to build a modern product, you'll be fighting uphill all the way. There is good reason for this: the company has been bitten by shiny products that didn't work out, and now they prefer tried and tested tools over new mindsets. Ordinarily, this shows excellent engineering discipline - at BrightEdge, though, it's bled into Not Invented Here syndrome from technical leadership, an almost paranoid rejection of anything new under the sun for even non-critical services that would reduce effort. It's not just tools - processes such as outage retrospectives, release retrospectives, enforcing service-level metrics and SLAs, disaster recovery tests, etc. are fledgling. This would be understandable for a non-IT company, but it is somewhat strange for an international decade-old Silicon Valley tech company to not have these in place. Attempts to improve this are ongoing, but they're hindered by immense technical debt, the effort is localised only in some teams, and there is active resistance from some members of technical management to consider investing in proven technologies that would make the company more efficient from a developer's standpoint. - The technical debt is high, and there is no consistent effort to try to improve on this or even estimate its extent. Imagine little to no documentation, impossible-to-find scattered technical specs for most of the product, no metrics for code coverage, and large silos. Coupled with high churn and only a thin scattering of developer-written tests, it's mostly your wits against the codebase and whatever expertise you can borrow from other people. Broken designs are rarely fixed (but isn't that always the case everywhere?). This has become a major impediment to the company's growth as it struggles to modernize. - Engineering management prioritises the development of new features at the expense of maintaining what's out there and fixing what's broken. This has resulted in the technical debt mentioned above, a lack of visibility into real experiences customers go through, the inability to reproduce issues without accessing production databases, constant fires for the operations team which are largely shoved under the rug, and so on. Meanwhile, there is mounting pressure to cut the six-week release cycle down to something shorter without adequately building safeguards to ensure a good product is released. It remains to be seen how they're going to pull it off. - Complaining is almost frowned upon. BrightEdge does not typically solicit feedback about its engineering standards directly from its engineers, and concerns voiced to management are never acted upon judging by anecdotal experience. Disagreement is rarely addressed directly. - No 401K match.