Subpar Pay, Above Par Snackbar, Obvious Class System, Lots of VPs, Poor Internal Vision/Direction
Pros
- Well stocked snack bar & kitchen area. And I mean so well stocked the 6-figure salaried software engineers who can certainly afford snacks have been seen stuffing their backpacks after everyone else is mostly gone for the day - Unlimited PTO for nearly whatever reason. Do you have a doctor's appt? Repairman coming over? Need to take three weeks off to go cave diving in Australia? Sure.. there's no bank of sick or vacation time to pull from - which also means if/when you leave there's no cashout of accrued vacation - Flexible schedules for most positions - Beautiful office space - the building is literally <3 years old at this point. Conferencing systems are high tech - Technology is very prevalent in everything - from the conference rooms to the desk and computers supplied - Choice of Mac or Windows machines - you can even run Linux, if you want to be in the special flower club or like being mostly on your own for support - Bagels every Friday. If that's your thing. It also comes with a self-serving 'informal' formal Q&A session with the C-levels.
Cons
- The pay is subpar. In fact, they almost tout this as a badge of honor. They will pretty much tell you that if you want to make lots of money, Impinj is not the place to be. So...you're telling me you know you pay poorly, and don't care. But it's cool though, they use the unlimited PTO and the snackbar as ways to woo 'talent' from the other competitors in the area - Recruiting and hiring is a disorganized hot mess. The head recruiter doesn't care to follow process and procedure and just rams people into the system. Once that offer letter is signed, they're done and the supporting organizations are left to sort out the pieces - Many mysterious departures of management people. Sometimes it comes with many weeks or even months of advance notice (insert vague internal blog post here), sometimes the person is gone for weeks before the company as a whole is told - Weekly 'Bagel Friday' was initially a way for C-level staff to share with the company some of the goings-on that occurred earlier in the week. It quickly devolved into a 'you should be there' sort of thing where you can watch leadership toot their own horn - Anonymous feedback system sounds good, but then the leadership staff will address any questions or complaints during the Bagel Friday in such a way that it would intimidate staff not to bother putting in any substantive feedback. Side benefit – reading the comments (they are periodically posted internally) lets you realize just how entitled many of the staff are - Entitlement. Many of the engineering staff are highly intelligent people – seriously, there are some pure geniuses there that have pioneered RF and the RFID industry. And with that pure genius comes the dysfunction and social ineptness. Worked there for several years and there were people that never make eye contact, continually get your name wrong (despite corrections). - Leadership staff. Probably the only one worth his salt is the CEO. The rest are empty shirts. And it’s been VeePee-a-palooza. I think there’s a promotion roulette wheel in the Sales division. They minted like 5 VPs in one month – out of thin air. When someone leaves, they also like to readvertise the position at a much higher level than it was when the person was there - Class System – you’re either sales or engineering. If you’re anything else… you’re nothing, and treated as such. If you’re in a support org, expect to be at the whims of those two groups as to whether they want to follow procedure or even bother doing anything they’re supposed to do - Unlimited PTO means there’s no cashout if you should leave the company - Path of least resistance. A team in manufacturing is absolutely dysfunctional (think: people in ops roles that are simply way underqualified) and it’s obvious to everyone, however leadership doesn’t want to be bothered with fixing it so they let it be – despite spending money and time to shore it up - Time w/the company is more important than ability in many roles. Some people in middle management are simply only there - Breakfast club of employees that leave early because they arrive early via vanpool, but most of them sit in the kitchen for 3 hours every morning, and then an hour or two at lunch - Talk about a product that sounds cool, seems cool, but is never really shown to the employees. But it’s apparently real since they’re selling it. Yay! Do the work for the thing!
