WeddingWire Software Engineer reviews

- culture has deteriorated heavily in last year - awful/incompetent senior management - many poor promotions and mis-hires in recent times - perks have been scaled back heavily (used to be free lunch for the entire last week of the month, free snacks from nature box, monthly company-paid happy hours etc.) - work/life balance is very erratic; some teams have 40 hour weeks others will regularly put in 50-60+ and there's no recognition or compensation for it - diva personalities - marketing-driven development - developers are code-monkeys with little to no input in products When I joined, this was probably the best company to work for in the DC area; yearly dev trips (all expenses paid) to Vegas and then Bahamas. A cornucopia of free lunches and happy hours, free snacks from NatureBox, reasonable hours and fun work with smart people. Developers also had a good deal of input and say in the product and the process before. This year our dev trip is Philadelphia : / I could drive there on the weekend but I don't because it's Philadelphia and I don't want to be there. All the perks that used to exist are slowly being scaled back and eliminated. Morale is at an all-time low. Recently, things have been taking a turn for the worse. Senior management and C-levels have been pushing a poorly executed shift to agile and a new 'pillar' structure and it has been a colossal failure. What was once a scrappy, lean team has turned into a nightmarish bureaucracy of middle-management where busybodies create hoops for people to jump through to deter any actual work getting done. All of this has also led to a toxic influx of office politics. Several diva personalities exist and senior management has their favorites. Cross one of them even accidentally and you can be sure that your name will get dragged through the mud behind your back while they smile and joke to your face. Overall stress is at an all-time high but compensation is low with wide disparities between engineers. If you do end up joining, make sure you negotiate before you join because your salary isn't going to jump much and they will lowball you if they can get away with it. A good 25% of the dev team has left due to poor compensation just this year.

It has become a terrible technology workplace starting at the top. The c-level's checked out, virtually every decision is delegated to vp's/architects or terribly made. A culture of continuous dumb decision making: Letting marketing dictate the what is being built. Spending two years to re-create wix. ew & Livebooks. Not a single good product since the yelp like wedding catalog made in 2008. The flood of middle-management without sound understanding of technology to run the company. The best developers organically hired pre-2014 are leaving, fired, or looking to leave. Those near the top who're staying are either paid absurd money, related to the boss, too loyal to see the faults in the work, or playing it safe to get paid another day. People have been fired to non-sensical reasons, the HR VP has quit, the new people department is a ineffective. Every good technology company has it's peak/golden era of growth where good smart people want to work there, they're building things, and having fun. Sooner or later the company grows stale, becomes corporate, and die off slowly from declining revenue growth (livingsocial/blackboard). The founders already got their money out of ww, they're diversified and invested other private equity companies. Those devs who stay are paid/overpaid enough so while the smart and talented leave because they're sick of it all. If you're a smart engineer then you should probably go work at one of the many other DC Tech startups. Weddingwire is bureaucracy, corporate politics, and bad management at this point in 2016.