A REAL Review that wasn't forced by marketing: perception over pay, principles, and people - Anonymous employee Nextiva Employee Review

Overall, this reads like a very sharp but grounded insider critique. From a “will I regret this later” standpoint, it’s mostly in the safe zone: you’re attacking patterns and leadership behavior, not making specific, provably false accusations about individuals’ private conduct. The main tweaks I’d suggest are about tone/length, reducing repetition, and softening a couple of lines that are more emotional than necessary without losing impact. Below is a lightly edited version I’d be comfortable with you posting. I’ll keep your voice, jokes, and key facts, and flag the few spots I’ve changed with comments in brackets so you can see what I adjusted. Cons This is not a company where “do great work, get rewarded” is how things work. It’s a place where optics, politics, and performance theater routinely outrun competence. Responsibilities pile up, pay lags behind market, and “future promotions” are dangled as a carrot that almost never arrives. The story is always that the next reorg, next quarter, or next “strategic shift” will finally align titles, pay, and reality. In practice, the goalposts move, the promises fade, and the people who actually keep things running are often the first ones labeled “not aligned” when they start asking for consistency. Layoffs are not rare events; they’re a recurring schedule. Cuts have hit at minimum every June and November for several years, with additional rounds in between. Whole groups in product, marketing, sales, HR, and operations have been affected (and probably more than I’m even aware of). Performance, tenure, or impact don’t feel like protection. Even customers notice the offshoring and see U.S. headcount quietly shrinking. It’s hard to build trust with anyone when people disappear every few months. Customers are vocal about it in public forums, and many are clearly unhappy. Leadership is obsessed with AI as the cure‑all: cost, headcount, product gaps, you name it. New telecom services get “launched” into production because someone at the top decides they’re live now. It’s common for those launches to go out with minimal internal rollout and major gaps in what frontline teams actually need: clear SKUs, what’s included, technical requirements, limitations, and realistic use cases. Sales is expected to sell it anyway, often with shifting pricing, half‑defined SKUs, and a couple of slides standing in for real enablement. It’s completely normal for employees to first hear that something is “live” from a customer mentioning a new feature or offer instead of from any internal communication. Product naming and packaging are their own special kind of chaos. Different offerings share nearly identical names, bundles sit under generic “Next‑something” or “Expert‑something” labels, and both employees and customers genuinely struggle to know what they actually have or what to call it this week. One plan’s “Pro” might be another plan’s “Basic” with a different label, and SKUs don’t always map cleanly to what marketing says. If you’re trying to support customers, a lot of your time is spent just answering, “What did we actually sell them, and what does that mean in practice?” Getting basic information can be like pulling teeth. People chase vendors for specs and screenshots or quietly look at competitors’ public materials just to piece together how similar devices or features behave. Then someone has to turn that into internal docs and FAQs because there is no single, reliable internal source of truth. Meanwhile, sales is still expected to hit targets on products they barely had time to learn, while the SKUs, names, and positioning shift faster than any training can keep up. Layoffs and offshoring are paired with relentless spin. Entire teams get cut, and on the same day external feeds are posting “Fri‑yay” content with confetti and leadership smiles. For anyone paying attention, it sends a very clear signal about what the real priority is. Sales is treated like the golden child, but churn there is high too; people cycle in and out before they fully understand what they’re selling. Leadership somehow still finds room for high‑end perks and “experiences,” while employees on the ground compare their pay to local fast‑food jobs and realize those comparisons aren’t jokes. The same pattern shows up in the way results and reviews are presented. You’ll see big, glossy claims about what “customers say” and how certain campaigns or products are performing that don’t line up with what people on the inside are actually seeing from real accounts and real usage. Internally, a lot of us just roll our eyes because it feels less like honest reporting and more like inflating numbers and cherry‑picking quotes to tell a story leadership wants to hear. When your own employees don’t believe the stats you broadcast, that’s a problem. Leadership is obsessed with AI as the cure‑all: cost, headcount, product gaps, you name it. New telecom services and “AI solutions” get launched into production because someone at the top decides they’re live now. It’s common for those launches to go out with minimal internal rollout and major gaps in what frontline teams actually need: clear SKUs, what’s included, technical requirements, limitations, and realistic use cases. Sales is expected to sell it anyway, often with shifting pricing, half‑defined SKUs, and a couple of slides standing in for real enablement. It’s completely normal for employees to first hear that something is “live” from a customer mentioning a new feature or offer instead of from any internal communication. You can feel the company quietly betting that AI will replace a lot of people; what you actually see is that the technology is nowhere near replacing the volume and complexity of work humans do today, so the gap just lands on the people who are left. The burden for making any of this work falls on the teams behind the scenes: support, operations, onboarding, enablement, and whoever catches what falls out of fast launches and faster promises. Decisions are made quickly at the top. The running joke is a founder wakes up and decides that day they want to launch a product, so everyone else scrambles to make it happen regardless of how (un)prepared the organization is. [I’d drop “never once have we had a successful launch in my years there” — that’s an absolute that could be nit‑picked; the sentence as written implies the same thing without the absolute.] Everyone is expected to operationalize decisions overnight. When timelines are impossible and gaps appear, accountability tends to flow down, not up. Even when those same groups are hit in the next layoff, it’s still framed as “strategic” and “necessary.” In some cases, employees only learn something has been launched because a customer tells them. Great look. Culture has steadily eroded. Forced return‑to‑office was sold as a way to rebuild connection and collaboration; in reality, it mostly highlighted how little trust was left. People come in because they have to, not because they want to. The atmosphere feels more like mandatory attendance than shared mission. Quiet quitting isn’t a buzzword here; it’s what happens when people stay long enough to realize the slick culture story doesn’t match what they live every day. Perks and slogans try to paper over the cracks. Catered lunches a couple of times a week are genuinely nice, but it doesn’t take long to see that free food is cheaper than fixing compensation. Hope you like boiled chicken. (To be fair, Facilities has been trying to improve it—credit where it’s due. Look, I finally found something to be positive about.) Security and IT were also consistently decent to work with. “Unlimited” time off looks impressive on a job description, yet the unwritten rules about when it’s “acceptable” to use it often make the people doing the most critical work feel the least able to unplug. When someone leaves or is laid off, there can be debates over what they “really” accrued. The messaging is all about balance, inclusion, and shared success; the reality is that branding and optics get more care than the basics. And to top it off, the CEO has publicly encouraged people to act like 22‑year‑olds with no work‑life balance, then required everyone who isn’t an executive to be back in the office four days a week “for proximity” while he is not exactly leading by example. One of his big moments was dialing in for an all‑hands from a Vegas hotel room, champagne in hand, talking loosely enough to make more than a few people uncomfortable. He’ll show up for a few weeks talking about how much money has been made (often while budgets, hiring, and headcount are tightening), and then disappear again to focus on other ventures, only to reappear from another bougie location. Must be nice to be him. The predictable result: a wave of FMLA notes and accommodations, and an office that somehow feels even more like a ghost town than before. If that move was meant to rebuild culture, it backfired. Smart moves don’t really live here. On top of all this, there’s a lot of energy put into managing the narrative instead of the reality. Marketing and what used to be the “culture” team regularly push employees to post glowing reviews, endorse leadership content, or hype up books and campaigns that don’t reflect what people are actually living day to day. When the same people who are scared of the next layoff are also being nudged to “share something positive,” it stops feeling like culture and starts feeling like PR management. If you’re considering working here, it really comes down to what you can tolerate: If you’re comfortable with constant rebrands, AI buzzwords as default answers, frequent layoff cycles, and a culture where perception routinely outruns substance, you may find your niche. If you’re looking for stability, clear strategy, and a place where straightforward work and honesty are rewarded instead of stretched thin, walk in with your eyes wide open. Consider walking past altogether.