Great People in an Extremely Frustrating Environment - Software Engineer II Comscore Employee Review

More superficially: compensation is subpar, health insurance is expensive, and “media measurement” is just a fundamentally uninteresting/ethically dubious field. Beyond that, though, there are several things that made working at Comscore frustrating. Because of the years of financial instability, there’s an overreliance on cheap, overseas contractors. People are loath to make decisions or take responsibility for getting things done, making it so that even modest progress can be halting. Perhaps it is because of this that the modern, cloud-based platform that was supposed to be rolled out three or four years ago is still unfinished. In their desperation to finally make a semi-functional product available to the clients, management has made some very questionable pivots with this new system. The continued struggles in building this new system was the biggest failure of my tenure. While the need for modernizing was real, poor planning, requirements gathering, software development methodology, and understanding of the system that was being replaced made it so that the new system was only better because of its modern tech stack. It honestly felt like we ignored all the good things about the legacy system and replicated the bad aspects. In other words, in spite of having this amazing opportunity to rebuild from the ground up, the lack of planning and real requirements meant that we were forced to write hacky, disjointed code, reactively forcing in new functionality that could have been integrated more seamlessly if there had been more foresight.