Lacks Leadership and Direction - Software Engineer CarGurus Employee Review

- It felt like leadership mentally abandoned our existing product offerings to dealers. While the company had been profitable selling software and ad space to dealers, by 2019 the company seemed uninterested in optimizing our core profitable products. This created a situation where feature teams felt written off when direction was roadmapped at the company. - Leadership’s investment into new product offerings felt misguided and poorly executed. Our P2P marketplace functions seemed unadvertised and phoned in, and our historical offer test alienated our dealer base (look up CarGurus Carvana Offer Test). It’s hard to feel excited about these new directions when the company can’t execute properly. - The COVID-19 layoffs were large, painful, and poorly communicated. After weeks of leadership saying that “we have the cash” and that we’d be able to weather this storm on sheer firm economics, hundreds of employees were RIFfed into a bad job market. Many high-level directors had no say in who was RIFfed, and the decisions around which teams had cuts (and by how much) seemed political. This created a culture nosedive that the company still hasn’t recovered from. - Engineering felt constantly under-resourced and understaffed. During my time there, it felt like I had to build out technologies and products that would need 4x the people to build at any other company. This led to a big culture of burnout, and that burnout culture was amplified after the COVID-19 layoffs. - It felt like there was a lot of institutionalized sexism at the company. The company hired a few VPs that would degrade and belittle the women around them. This created a culture that felt hostile towards women.