MobileSmith Reviews

Even the good reviews mention 'growing pains', and I am pretty sure those are from present employees who have been tasked with shoring up the star rating. Unfortunately, the low reviews are more honest. The CEO listed here is not the current CEO. The guy in charge now clearly wants the luxury of leaning heavily on his direct reports' decisions, but those guys hate each other and boy does that make trying to get pretty much anything done at MobileSmith super hard. Everyone is overworked and underpaid, and that situation was just accelerating when I left. This was done in the name of profitability, but it's hard to imagine how profitable a company with a team that is so gun-shy and burnt out can possibly be. People were constantly rotating out for various reasons (more money, less hassle, more structure, getting out from under the horrible, sometimes abusive, management) and as of 2nd half of 2017 positions were not being backfilled. So the review that mentioned 'doing the work of 2-3 people' is pretty dead on. How long does a company have 'growing pains' like this? Sales did a great job of bringing in new customers, but all attempts to retain the customers once acquired had stopped by the time I left. There were only enough people to keep feature work moving forward, but one wonders who features are even for when customers stick for two years and then drop service. The product is a good idea that is being progressively poorly implemented due to constant change: mobile years are worse than dog years, and trying to keep up an aging and extremely complex platform built on an obsolete framework that only a few people still present even know how to use feels like a losing proposition. Rotating new people in is not the best idea when it can take six months to a year for someone to learn how to use the product enough to actually work on it. All that said, the biggest problem I had, aside from the extremely low pay, was the complete lack of structure. Not only was there virtually no direction or leadership coming from management, frequently we'd get conflicting messages; many times from the same person! And then, in the course of your job you'd try to make decisions to keep work moving forward, you would be told that those decisions were utterly wrong. Big changes, like development methodology (which changed three times in the < 3 years I was there), were mandated without team input and you were expected to be psychic with respect to these changes as training was non-existent. Responses to questions asked frequently took the shape of a 45 minute monologue about team direction on the topic, and you are left even more puzzled than before you asked the question. But again, be prepared to be read the riot act if you guessed wrong. Low pay and hard work are obstacles that can be overcome if you trust the product you're making or your managers, or at the very least enjoy the work you're doing, but piling on top of that deep confusion and systemic chaos because of poor leadership and terrible communication just isn't going to work out. My guess is soon there won't be any 'growing pains', only regular pain as everything falls apart.

Low pay, unreachable managers with unreasonable expectations, everyone has their own agenda. Managers keep hiring young people with little team experience because they work cheap and don't know how things are supposed to work. This used to be a nice place to work, until people started to leave (the money-to-work ratio has never been high) and management changed significantly. About half the people who were in various roles in the company (of around 30, give or take) when I started have left or been forced out. The churn in sales has always been as high as the expectations, but the same unreasonable expectations have infected development, and now the churn there is just as high and the resulting chaos is reaching unmanageable levels. People are leaving in droves. Pay has always been low, but as people leave, positions are not backfilled and the survivors are forced to take on multiple roles in order to keep moving forward, so you work for your initial low pay but do the work of two or three people. And then, when sales are low and resulting bonuses are low, your performance evaluation is suddenly less positive, but you're told not to worry about it, everyone's evaluation took a hit for the same reasons, even if you personally have no control over those reasons. Nothing you do matters, and you will receive nothing you ask for unless you are one of the chosen few that management inexplicably loves. Upper management is happy to ignore the problems as long as specific 'can do no wrong' middle management has all the right answers for why nothing is getting done, meanwhile middle management is busy playing favorites, forcing sr people to leave for nebulous reasons, and badly implementing new 'process' parts that are poorly understood by all involved. Often these would only be portions of a new process, with whole pieces meant to make the process work omitted. At no point is the team consulted or their wishes taken into consideration. Morale is extremely low, and no one is listening or seems to care. It won't matter too much if people keep leaving. there won't be anyone left to complain or do the work.