TL;DR: Unprofessional, No Trust, Condescending, Immature, Micromanagement
The best way I can summarize Geek Powered Studios is as an abusive partner. They make you feel like less of a person when you don’t agree in full with their shoddy methodology, loose morals, or even when you have a slightly different opinion on anything that doesn’t align with their views/values. When you’ve gotten to your witts end and want to leave the company they tell you what you want to hear and make a lot of promises to bring you back in. Promises that are rarely kept and obviously aren’t thought out. It’s a cycle that I’ve seen over and over again involving myself and my co-workers over the span of my employment. It’s also how they have almost completely abolished any shred of diversity.
Geek Powered Studios is one of the most unprofessional places I have ever worked. The way management conducts themselves is abhorrent. Upper management will often use derogatory and offensive language when they are upset and speaking about clients, employees, ex-employees, potential clients, and potential employees. They also allow clients to treat employees very poorly, in once case allowing the entire company to be blackmailed during a company wide phone call. The CEO and upper management pride themselves on “tests” that they impress on their employees. These “tests” are not used for benchmarking, to assess skill level, or to help provide career pathing, they are simply a way for management to stroke their egos about how dedicated you are or are not to the company in their opinion. Management itself gets very little training on interpersonal skills, time management, delegation, and other basic managerial traits. In the training meetings that I have seen, management sets the tone by mocking the training, making jokes, arguing that the presenter is wrong, or completely bowing out and working during presentations instead of participating or at least paying attention.
Trust isn’t something you earn by the caliber of your work it’s something obtained by being friends and socializing outside of the office with upper management. Upper management themselves, in a company wide meeting, chastised employees who did not thank a manager for bringing cupcakes, that they had another employee bring in for them and for not participating in a brunch with the CEO and his wife on a Sunday morning. They openly stated that those who didn’t participate wouldn’t be heard as loudly and that those who did participate would have the upper hand when it came to their concerns being addressed. Management is horrible about recognizing or rewarding employees for good work. Management often blames their employees for their shortcomings. The CEO buys program after program to monitor employee moral and when he doesn’t get the numbers back that he hopes for, he blames the employees and buys a new gauge for moral. In a company wide meeting he once printed out feedback and asked us if we were “trolling” him.
I could go on and on about the low points of this company but I feel as if the numbers speak for themselves. In the span of a few months Geek Powered Studios has had eight employees leave, either because they were terminated or left of their own accord. Of those eight, seven were female. The CEO in a quarterly presentation promised that when the company reached fifteen employees that an HR manager would be brought on board to help with the cultural rifts and career pathing issues that came up time and time again. That HR person was not hired until seven people were gone in the span of two months.
