Bodybuilding.com Reviews

Where to start: The most obvious was departmental management that was in over its head and was neither aware of its weaknesses nor that its processes that were supposed to catch problems actually routinely failed to do so. The culture in the editorial department was one that not only accepted mediocrity but fought efforts at improving quality, resulting in glaring errors and bad advice going live online. Not only did no one seem to care, they pushed back against those who did. Companywide: 1. The company was run like a boys club when I first arrived, with the young management team dating employees and hosting parties that got out of hand. 2. Don't expect much diversity on staff. Its a bro-world with almost zero racial diversity, diversity of age, and a culture of getting out the door before 4 p.m. 3. Outright homophobia in one area of the editorial dept. despite constant complaints to HR, which failed to root out the problems. 4. No feedback loop to HR of problem managers despite promises. 5. Decision-making confined to small, inexperienced leadership team that has resulted in zig-zag direction of one poorly thought out direction after another. Who thinks out bad ideas like Nourish + Bloom, or running the editorial team as an ad agency? Complete failures! Editor-in-chief lacked basic understanding of not only the subject he was charged in covering but how to implement routine processes to catch mistakes. In fact I found that despite being empowered to fix mistakes I had encountered, it was met by a back-stabbing group that simply didn't care and fought back. Who, for example, thinks "I don't care if the information is wrong because that's what the writer wanted," is an appropriate response when an editor is trying to fix dozens of mistakes in a piece, and then the EIC throws up roadblocks to ensure it doesn't get fixed? Poorly managed editorial team from the top, led by an editor-in-chief who found it uncomfortable to his personality style to deal with conflict and would rather lock himself in a room down the hall and read manuscripts all day long. Nobody was on the same page as to a commitment to excellence, and the result is what you see today: Glaring training errors and bad advice abound, sometimes dozens in a single article! The blind are leading the blind here.

Bodybuilding.com was founded on customer service and the desire to change people's lives. This was truly the case for most of the company’s history, but at some point, the focus transitioned to nothing but the bottom line. The current leadership has little to no regard for their customers or employees. A true desire to serve the customer was lost forever and the company's culture was destroyed in the process. They still act as though they care but that's just not the case. The only thing they care about is profitability, which is comical because they haven't seen that since they chose to focus on money instead of their customers. Go figure. The environment is toxic through and through, coming directly from the top. The CEO and his everchanging direction is an absolute joke. He is a sleazy salesman constantly selling false hopes to his top-heavy, ever-changing leadership, and whoever owns the company at the time. He is all talk and no action, other than endless restructure and shifting direction. His regular temper tantrums and fits of rage, often end in the firing of his own leadership that he brought in, blaming them instead of taking ownership of his poor leadership and decision making. He likes to say he supports and makes data-driven decisions. If that's the case, his data is garbage, or it’s misread and manipulated to fit his own agenda. Both are probable. He sells the concept to his ever-changing regime that winds of change are here, and bigger and better things are on the horizon. A new beginning. The new recruits of the day hop on here to leave stellar ratings, quickly blaming the crusty “old-timers” lack of effort and pampered bottoms for the demise of the company. In reality, veterans are the only ones keeping the ship from sinking entirely, reusing old band-aids and delipidated equipment to fill in as many wholes as they can, while the leadership continues to make new, more damaging holes than before. They continually ignore the obvious platform issues that could easily be resolved if given the proper support. Instead, they focus on the most recent, so-called data-driven initiatives, continually leaving half baked, unfinished projects behind, to never be completed or maintained properly. Eventually, the loyal new hires realize that the sails were full of holes and the ship wasn’t going to move, other than downward, because countless, unaddressed band-aids could no longer hold the ship together. The new hires would either jump ship or get tossed overboard faster than they could find replacements. What was left of the loyal staff, who actually did care about customers, got little to no respect for what they did for the company. Their knowledge was not valued and oftentimes, they were left out of conversations completely, leaving them in constant darkness. The leadership said they cared to your face, but their actions spoke much louder than their lies. They would sit and spin in meetings together all day, continually rehashing things that were discussed repeatedly, only to walk out of the meetings with no action items and nothing accomplished. If decisions were made, it was typically a knee jerk reaction to a perceived, non-existent fire. The leadership would run around with buckets, aimlessly, unnecessarily splashing water everywhere, mandating their crew to drop what they were doing and help put out the intentionally set fire they just lit. Then they would hand them their empty buckets, while they proudly marched off to another pointless meeting to solve “real” problems. Meanwhile, their deckhands were left to clean up the unnecessary mess that was made, while being questioned why they couldn’t accomplish anything. They were often openly insulted for their so-called lack of productivity. Good, hardworking, honest, and smart people were repeatedly thrown overboard and left to drown in their wake. The company, and what it once stood for has been destroyed and will never be what it once was.