This section is where I will spend most of my review of my years of service and all the observations myself and many others before me have gathered. My hope is to have potential candidates skip Peak6 as their employer and look else where after reading this review and the slew like it below!
The company is controlled by two owners followed by a group of tight nit partners and then a small group of micro partners scattered across their many business's. Next is a group of middle managers that are either direct friends or directly friends of friends of someone above. I stress this point because anyone looking for a management role in this place needs to understand that THERE IS NO CAREER PATH here! The middle manager's are "yes" men to the technology CTO whom I can only cover in a paragraph dedicated to them below and the partners above them.
The tech organization functions like a person with severe ADD. One day they will make a plan to build a system consisting of such and such technologies only to change their mind mid project and deflect on everyone around them when things go bad. Now to speak to the point of things going bad. I have never seen so many production issues, hardware failures and over all chaos in any place I have ever worked. Due to the lack of planning and then constant changes in requirements leading up to release day, the company stumbles on a day to day basis and does absolutely nothing about it!
The tech stack is like a playground for the CTO and the business as they constantly tell people what and how things should be done even though they are not hands on. This is what makes working at peak6 that much harder. The ONLY opinions that are listened to are the CTO's and the managing business partners. The rest of the remaining employees are puppets and just a means to an end. They will not hesitate to lower moral, talk down and make employees feel useless on an everyday basis. Most of it is done via body language such as eye rolls, looks to one another and shaking of heads.
There is no work life balance what so ever as most people are required to work early, stay late and then fix constant production issues into the late hours not excluding weekend work for infrastructure changes. There are hardly any plans and communication between groups is scattered and not accurate. The only way to really know what is happening is in the moment and become really good at being reactive.
The CTO of tech is a person who has to get their way no matter what. Every productive conversation can only end one way and that is by agreeing with what they want regardless if it is right or wrong. This particular person paints the brightest picture to the partners and owners and everyone else has to suffer behind the made up stories of success. Every morning there is a stand up that turns into confusion and usually a change of requirements followed by blank stares.
The company has no production support, quality assurance, real business analysts or UI developers. Their HR department has also went full circle 2 times since I worked ther. Don't believe me? Try it out and see for yourself.
The developers are left to juggle their work load and become fill ins for the non-existant positions listed above. At some point those people did exist but directly left because of the tech leadership and constant fire fights caused by no planning and then changing of a non-existant plan along with the said eye rolling etc!
ps. The salaries are not even on par with the competition
I want to end this by saying that everyone I personally know that has been employed by Peak6 and has left is in a much better spot both financially and most importantly physically. This place just sucks the life out of people and I hope anyone reading this will think twice.
