learned a lot - Anonymous employee Adbrite Employee Review

Very little is sacred--as an engineer you'll be trusted to design and build whatever you need to solve some tough scaling problems. Management more willing than most to invest in robust replacements for legacy systems. Good opportunities to pick up newer technologies and move away from bad ones, and mobility even between departments. Enjoyable culture of going out for drinks with a big alumni network. Good pay and perks--central downtown office, insurance options, commuting, lunch, gym.

Ongoing unrealistic expectations being set about how much impact each project will have. Too much unwritten tribal knowledge lost with turnover, and not enough communication between departments about problems and opportunities. Code doesn't often get the refactoring it needs.

Downtown SF, (at the time) a possibility for a buyout, (at the time) free catered lunches, engineering team stuck together. AdBrite was a rising star - founded by a web celebrity in downtown SF with decent benefits, not the least of which was the free lunches they used to provide. AdBrite eventually moved locations to Market Street next to The Sports Club LA for which they provided a slightly discounted membership. And there was talent - so much talent. The talent that passed through the doors at AdBrite was unmatched. If only they could have retained that talent, they might have had a shot. But ...

Horrible management, disrespect from upper management towards employees, incompetent CEO, high turnover, technical leaders do not understand technology. The technology stack is a joke. Basically, instead of using proven open source solutions, AdBrite uses custom-rolled solutions for many of the layers in their stack which are far inferior to their open source equivalents. For the longest time, their search engine was running on something the CTO wrote. Iggy Fanlo (CEO) once sent out an email telling employees they needed to work 60 hour weeks. The problem is that there just wasn't enough work to do, nor was there motivation or any kind of guidance. The founders of the company frequently sent out disparaging emails telling employees that there were too many bugs in the site without setting clear goals as to how to solve the problem.