Neighborly Software Reviews

Only a few and depending on which department you're in, they may not directly affect you... yet. The main problem here is in product and because this will ultimately affect everyone in the company, I write this review: Everyone on the current product team is fairly new to product or new to Neighborly which isn't bad in of itself but it necessitates a strong experienced product leader which Neighborly does not have. Here's what they have: 1. The head of product is a seemingly nice person who wants to make you feel like they can be trusted. Tread carefully here. I will say they're very friendly so that's a plus. 2. This person has the remarkable talent of being able to talk forever without really saying anything except, 'right?!' 10,000 times. Not a whole lot of very meaningful, directional or helpful dialog comes out of lengthy meetings. 3. Product mgt meetings are scheduled by this person to talk about best practices with no agenda, no actual content and so they have to rely on other senior PMs with actual product experience to drive these types of meetings 3. This person is rarely online and team members aren't exactly sure what they do. 4. Prioritization is a joke. The person seems to say yes to everything (not really everything but you get the jist) and then ask PMs to prioritize- I would and present my top 3, they would agree then I got buy in from all other executive stakeholders and we all signed off. The head of product would come to me the next day and ask the status of some old thing that wasn't on the list or even a high priority and I'm like, 'whaaat?' Lol 5. This person does not appear to have significant experience in product or Agile and while I'm sure is talented in many other things, this role is too critical to not be sharper in the practice area of product management. Lastly, a senior pm in this role will have to be very careful to not step on the head of product's toes because you'll start doing what the head should be doing and junior PMs will need to rely on senior pms... IMO of course

* While the company does want to modernize the platform the software is built on, they're not always really willing to take the time to do that correctly. Lots of lip service here in the all hands meetings, but when push comes to shove this is not actually a priority. * Management positions/promotions seem to be solely favorite based. Merit and desire for the position seem to matter very little. This is mostly fine because the people are such a plus here, but it does sometimes end up with people in management positions that they are not particularly qualified to be in. * Not a ton of career direction available at the more senior levels of development. They're somewhat willing to let you blaze your own trail to a new position if you're interested in that, but there's not really a like "progression" set out for you. Nor are there many devs with +7 years of experience there who can help guide you. * Tech decision making is shaky. I've got 10 years experience and there was only 1 dev here with more. When me and her would push for things as best/modern practice it was often ignored with a "why can't we do it the way we've always done it" - even though the way they've always done it was the source of several of their current predicaments from a tech/scaling perspective. * PTO and benefits are kinda bad honestly. Time off carries over in weird ways, and it's easy to lose stored PTO. You also don't get a ton of PTO either. The health insurance is ok but somewhat expensive. * Grinding over 40 hour weeks is definitely encouraged here. It's not required, but if you're not willing to be a "rise and grind" kind of person you will be limited in what is available to you. These last few cons are more recent and definitely impacted my decision to leave, but I'm not sure how permanent they will be: * Instability/Inconsistent messaging from the top. Several people were laid off during a recent re-org, but this re-org wasn't really ever announced and just kinda started chopping people left & right w/o much explanation. The tech team was rarely affected but it was weird to come in on a Monday and be like "Ok who's not here this week". * I was initially encouraged to speak up when I felt a design pattern was wrong or if I felt like we were doing something that would create a mountain of tech debt later...This shifted early in 2024 and those conversations started happening less. Even to the point of being asked to "just say yes" even if I thought something wasn't possible in a given timeline.