Gigster Reviews

*Ineffective HR department: do not overcomplicate your life by trying to resolve issues internally with them. If you're facing harassment or discrimination, move on to another company. Retaliation? It's rampant and fairly widely accepted, so again, move on. It doesn't matter if you have written proof and 10 witnesses. It doesn't matter if the perpetrator is a bad leader, and incompetent at his/ her job. Gigster is all about "optics", and putting lipstick on a pig to cover up bad managers and toxic employees. *So much unconscious bias within the company, that it becomes obvious early on. The ones who unfailingly kiss butt and offer false flattery to the Gigster executive team, float to the top. The executive assistants, in particular, are the cause of many employees quitting from Gigster in the last year. They are master manipulators who use their position to gossip and backbite about other employees. *Gigster is still relatively new, and so unfortunately, you might get stuck with a manager who essentially hit the jackpot, by being an early employee at the company and rose through the (small) ranks because of that fact alone.

This was once a promising start-up, now decimated as a result of one bad decision after another made under the inept leadership of current CEO Christopher Keene. Contrary to the redesigned brand marketing, the company has long since departed from any path of serious innovation in the 'software gig economy' or 'remote team' spaces and it now serves as a glorified dev shop – underpaying/overworking freelancers, rushing into risky projects, dealing with high project turnover, and using sticky contracts to transact with a few troubled, often-irate clients. What remains of Gigster is a shell of an organization beset by internal bickering, nepotism, number padding, low bars, and dwindling coffers. When I left in 2019, multiple clients were threatening to walk due to significant project issues and management was contemplating several financial 'Hail Marys' in order to keep the lights on – all for some mythical inflection point when business metrics would suddenly make sense for a VC-funded tech start-up. The sales team was also struggling to execute on any of the flavor-of-the-week strategies to bring in new work, big logos and – most importantly – recurring revenue streams. From a purely services perspective, not much was on a healthy path. To make matters worse, the organization is _still_ attempting to clean up the mess left by Keene's firing of nearly the entire engineering & design teams – without any semblance of product discipline. Don't hit a KPI target? Change the KPI! Or, better yet, make use of some creative reporting to mask 'misses' as 'successes.' Either way, product operations seem to largely serve the egos of the executive team rather than contribute to a comprehensible growth strategy. These are the smartest people in the room and will swiftly fire those whose loyalty comes into doubt. One newer VP asked several of my team about our loyalties outright during our initial 1:1s with them. A majority of this team have since quit and the VP remains employed with the company at the time of writing this review. I sincerely doubt anything has improved. If you do decide to join Gigster, be prepared for long hours, political conniving, angry/adversarial clients, low morale, disillusioned freelancers, burn-out culture, marketing woo, blame games, and a dismal business outlook. My advice is to skip buying a ticket and watch this train wreck from a safe distance.