Facade of 'Fun' masks history of layoffs - Anonymous employee AddThis Employee Review

2.0
2 June 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Many great engineers and other people, hackathons, game room, guess the catered lunch & snacks are worth something

Cons

Doing exciting work with like-minded passionate people in a fun environment sold me on Addthis so I never could understand why I kept sensing fear from some coworkers who had been at the company longer. Then people started disappearing. Senior management told us everything was great, that they were simply cutting some unneeded positions and the outlook was still peachy. Just a couple weeks before getting cut along with 15% of my colleagues I was told everything was fantastic with the company and with my personal performance. They sent us home in a matter of minutes and gave nearly no severance. I've since been told by several other ex-Addthis (Clearspring) employees that this was nothing new. Besides total lack of job-security other cons are: Unresolved disagreements in senior leadership, culture divisions within company seemingly stemming from the different merged companies, and the lack of defined, earned PTO makes it hard to take time off

Explore other reviews about AddThis

5.0
17 May 2019
Anonymous freelancer
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Flexible, nice people, good product

Cons

Pay everything else is immaterial

5.0
9 Apr 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Interesting technical challenges with a ton of opportunities to really pull things apart to see how they work and design new solutions. Wide variety of projects that still add value. Feel like doing some micro optimizations? No problem; you can do so without feeling like you are spending your time sub optimally. Another day you might want to hack on some web ui - still helpful. Or run an experiment with billions of records, or dive deep into the TCP stack. If you've ever been interested in "big data" or using Hadoop, you will get your fill. You can use Hadoop if you want, but they have their own platform which they actively develop and works more efficiently if less smoothly. Working here will teach you so much about data processing and analysis that you will not only look down on people who use Hadoop/MapReduce, but on the very developers who made them. Engineering management is competent and reasonable. Work hours are extremely flexible. Coworkers are all pleasant. Free lunch, snacks, drinks etc.

Cons

Most of the company won't understand what you do. Neither will most of the internet. The flip side of having so many things to work on is that the age old "20% of the work for 80% of the benefit" frequently compels you to let ever more perfectly reasonable improvements/ projects sit in your back log. Other parts of the company are sometimes a little more volatile

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