Jibo Reviews

I can’t accuse management at Jibo of not dreaming big. They wanted the robot to not only compete with products like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, but to be the next iPhone. It would be an amazing robotic home companion that consumers would gladly pay $700 for. Unfortunately, my impression of management was that they never had a very clear idea of how to achieve that. There seemed to be a lot of, “well, we’ll figure it out as we go” or “our third-party developers will step up and create great content”. When I was there, management was still pushing “visioning exercises” and hackathons to generate application ideas. This might have made sense in 2015, but it wasn’t where the company needed to be in 2017. The lack of clear direction from above trickled down into the working environment. People generally understood their own local domain, but there were regular coordination and communication issues between teams. Software or the build process often broke, often as a result of some change that not everyone got (or understood) the memo for. New employees weren’t well-supported or given much direction. Documentation would quickly fall out of date, and it was hard to keep track of the current state of the architecture. QA was overworked. There was a lot of dependence on trendy workflow processes that worked fine on a granular level, but didn’t address the macro issues. Valuable employee time was wasted on frivolous distractions such as useless meetings or a day of New Age-y team bonding exercises. If you've seen recent promotional videos of the robot online, ask yourself why they don't show anything particularly hype-worthy. Then, consider the most obvious answer to that question. I can’t recommend working here, unless your goal is to get enough experience to join whatever companies are sucking up Jibo veterans a year from now. Throwing a bunch of new hires into the trenches might get some sort of basically functional robot out the door by the end of the year, but I’ve never known a company’s deeper problems to be fixed by adding more developers at the last minute.

It's hard to describe the level of dysfunction that exists at Jibo. Be prepared to spend a lot of time working for work's sake, pivoting, pivoting again, changing managers, teams, jobs, projects, processes, goals, deadlines, etc. There's very little respect from senior leaders with regard to personal life separation from work. There's a constant feeling that you could never do enough. Many are expected to work unrealistic hours (some staff get in at 6 and leave at 9 multiple days a week or work consistently on weekends) for very little gain. This takes a toll on morale, especially since focuses shift often. Teams have been sprinting for years, with no product shipped to show for it. Changes, mandates, appeals do not stick leaving brilliant minds idle on remedial work. It's hard to feel that you can make a difference at Jibo. Most of the decisions are made in an unclear way, on short notice, often without much transparency, and often reneged after a period of time. They've created an environment where it can appear that you are able to influence or help, but change and progress is tightly controlled by senior leaders. Very top down, but cleverly disguised as a team-oriented startup where anyone can solve problems.