Compass reviews

- The CTO, who is alum from Amazon, is heavily biased on bringing in Amazon hires for leadership positions in Product & Engineering. It's a sign that the org is becoming more like Amazon, and not in a good way. The leadership hires also seem to heavily lean towards a specific demographic: Indian males. It's really blatant. - Promotions are rationed, probably to hold down compensation expense. But even if you get promotion, compensation increase is typically small. - Review cycles drag on months past their scheduled end time. - If there's an issue related to compensation, you can expect it to be resolved in the company's favor. For example, someone should have been paid a referral bonus before they left because they met all the requirements, but the payment was late, and then afterwards the company said that they don't need to pay out the referral bonus anymore since the person is no longer an employee. In another example, there were employees who joined prior to a capital raise and were promised options at a certain strike price, but because the company was late in issuing them their equity comp, those employees got their options at a higher strike price, which is less favorable to their compensation. It's either incompetence in HR / compensation processes, or intentionally screwing over employees; in either case, it's not good. - Product managers are not able to do their jobs effectively because the CEO overrides their plans and decisions based on gut feeling and the feedback he hears from agents. This may be a contributing cause with the issues with product direction, where the end outcome is poor product adoption. And all the product decisions he makes are going to make Compass more into a brokerage, and not into a tech/software company with high margins. - Company has had layoffs recently and salary reductions. Partly this is due to coronavirus which has heavily impacted company revenues. It's going to be a tough time ahead, and it's hard to see a path to IPO. How can the company justify a decent IPO price when it's still operating like a regular brokerage? Investors will ask why not just buy Realogy instead? - The biggest problem with the startup, if you apply learnings from Silicon Valley startups, is lack of product/market fit. If you didn't have generous signing bonuses and commission splits for agents, would they be flocking to join you based on your product offering? No. I think that easy VC money has allowed the company to expand aggressively via incentivized recruitment and brokerage acquisitions, while putting off the problem of building a compelling product. This is the problem that must be solved before anything else, to build a viable company.

- Moved myself and other employees between teams a bunch - Lack of some modern benefits (limited PTO, no 401k matching) - Somewhat hands-off from management, leading to issues below - The main reason for lack of a better rating: the pandemic response. In early March the company informed us that we would be temporarily starting to work from home. Like many people, I left a lot of my belongings at the office, since we were given short notice and I could not carry everything back at once. We worked from home for a week, during which time I received a positive first performance review, and then we were unceremoniously laid off the following Monday morning, and quickly disconnected from Slack so we couldn't say goodbye to our coworkers. The compensation for this was decent, but it took FIVE MONTHS to get my belongings sent back to me, and not having a job made the following months and job search difficult. During said search I managed to get a really nice offer, but they asked to use my previous manager as a reference (the same manager who gave me a positive performance review, but who managed many people and didn't know me too well), and, for no discernable reason, he tanked said reference (either badmouthing me or not saying anything positive), my offer was rescinded, and he never returned my emails. I was struggling at the time, and it was devastating. I don't understand why someone would give a reference if they had nothing positive to say. Additionally, I had heard whispers that the company was hiring similar positions to mine and that they weren't doing too badly after all, but internal recruiters were fairly non-responsive and wishy-washy about rehiring. I have been honestly kindof shocked about the whole situation, seeing as the company seemed to be doing well and seemed to care about its employees prior to the layoffs. Additionally, I (and other fairly-new employees) personally lost all equity in the company, since it took a year to vest, and I was cut off just shy of that benchmark. It all felt like a combined giant middle finger to myself and my other laid-off coworkers, and I hope nothing like this happens there again.