Serious Infrastructure Problems - Software Developer Blue Goji Employee Review

2.0
10 Aug 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

On the positive side, the company has some awesome talent and great personalities, including marketing and sales guys, the Scrum Master, and about half of the Developers and Designers. Work life balance is good, with moderate flexibility. The owner is incredibly rich and won't run out of cash any time soon. The fitness-gaming product is rather nice.

Cons

Given this is such a small company, it's difficult to speak openly without revealing my identity. Unfortunately, there are also several major downsides. The office is an open-office, which is incredibly distracting. While the scrum master tries his hardest to keep things organized, requirements change significantly and often. Mentorship opportunities are are nonexistent, and advancement consists of more work without additional perks. Talent is regularly reassigned or TRICKED into to roles they're either ill-equipped for or uninterested in, such as ios/python to java/web, designer to product-manager, game-dev to app-dev, two leads (one had to 'surrender'), and backend to front-end. Three of our best developers left in the last six months, and the talent hired recently is ill-equipped to replace them. Most recently, several of our devs nearly completed the backend for a major new launch of one of our core products. When the owner saw the placeholder UI, he made them scrap the entire backend, and dragged them into about 4 weeks of meetings where they weren't allowed to code. Worse, the owner's pet names for components make absolutely no sense and contribute to confusion, such as "Reward Scheme" means "how users earn points." That is only one of many examples of terrible and confusing names.

Explore other reviews about Blue Goji

5.0
25 Sept 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great staff. Grate app. CEO really friendly

Cons

Little messy about jira tickets

3.0
18 May 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Founder CEO is super passionate and really committed to helping people get healthy using the gaming product he and the other founders created. He's clearly very smart and hires other smart people to work at Blue Goji. There are some really good people who have worked there. He has the classic ability of a successful entrepreneur to create a vision that is years beyond the current technology and market conditions. Thinking way outside the box, he sees a wide range of possibilities and is willing to work extremely hard to get there. He puts in the hours too. The leadership team can be open to new ideas from any of the employees, not just management. He and management team are caring and reasonable about helping employees deal with the things that occur in life, i.e., schedule flexibility when you need it. The health care plan is a better one than most start ups offer, is paid for by the company and includes an HSA. And you can exercise at your office because the company has cardio machines set up to test the product. Blue Goji can be a good place to get experience and try a lot of different tasks.

Cons

The flip side to having a big vision and strong work ethic is that it can be hard for leaders like this to be patient when the team is trying their hardest but progress is falling short. Sometimes the issues lie within the industry or other external factors, but the team does feel the CEO's frustration when things aren't going the way expected. Another challenge result from a double edge sword is scope creep. When a leader sees so many features that can be developed and he is committed to creating the best possible product, he can inadvertently create a cycle of continually changing product requirements. That of course, makes it hard to hit deadlines and bring the product to market. I saw the teams experience a lot of frustration with this dynamic.

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