Nerdery Reviews

Pros

Seasoned design leaders with lots of expertise in UX/UI and a willingness to teach and develop talent.

Cons

Focus on "billable hours" was a distraction at times...

Pros

Craft Beer on tap, dogs in the office, free snacks, generous PTO.

Cons

Management!! Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Pros

There are still some good people that work there.

Cons

Leadership has run the company into the ground. Its sad, given what the company once was.

Pros

- Great culture. Unlike any culture you will ever see. - Great managers and coworkers. - Room to develop your skills. - In response to COVID-19 Nerdery leadership sent out some very encouraging messages. Including in regards to the police protests. It was nice to see. - Best job I've ever had until COVID-19 hit.

Cons

Nerdery responded to COVID-19 by doing the following: 1. Deferred salary raises. Even for promoted employees. 2. Temporarily cut salaries of highest earners. 3. Voluntary and forced furloughs. 4. Light lay offs (so far). 5. Heavy PTO restrictions. 6. Accepted PPP loan but has not promised to give back pay to employees who lost salary. They are still hopeful that the loan will be forgiven. Nerdery claims that the company is still healthy, yet they did all of these things. Nerdery is NOT entitled to our money in any case.

Pros

If you are looking to really accelerate your career and get experience building digital with incredible brands then Nerdery is a fantastic fit for you. Leadership is solid and the transformation I have seen over the past few years has been incredible. I love how Nerdery empowers me to run and grow at an incredible pace. If you do good work ad prove yourself, you will always be rewarded with bigger and better opportunities. Also, work/life balance is the absolute best of any company I've ever worked for. Lots of trust and flexibility is given to people who are able to consistently deliver.

Cons

Like any services company, the pay isn't the best. I would also say that Nerdery has two cultures, one of the legacy Nerds(who can be kind of crabby and set in their ways) and one of the new Nerds(who are high energy and collaborative). This is just a general rule of thumb and there are plenty of exceptions but I think your experience at Nerdery will largely depend on who you work for and if you can rise above the occasional naysayer.

Pros

I’ve worked with a lot of great people while at Nerdery. There were some smart people there that really cared and it showed. It was because of those people that I was able to grow. I also haven’t seen another software company promote people internally as well as Nerdery does, for the most part (see below). There are some really interesting and engaging projects as well, but they seem few and far between. There was some focus on training, but only if it was something the company was going to focus on. “Soft” perks such as dogs, food, and beer.

Cons

It’s been mentioned a lot, but pay could be better. They recognized it was an issue and said they were working on it, but it rarely felt like progress was made. Even promotions ended up just being a standard merit increase. Even when it came to hardware, it was impossible to get a new machine in order to do your work because it wasn’t in the budget. While there were some awesome projects at the company, the focus had shifted towards CMS work that they could turn out quickly. Unfortunately Nerdery had decided a while back it wasn’t interested in this kind of work and laid off a bunch of CMS developers and projects. There’s been a recent shift towards hiring junior talent. This was exciting at first, but it seems like the decision was mostly around reducing costs. Often times these people would not get the support they needed and were thrown onto projects by themselves. Mentorship is mentioned a lot, but resources (especially time) aren’t allocated towards it. They also like to talk about their diversity initiative, but it felt they were trying to check a box. There were talented woman who were overlooked for promotions. Internal processes are a mess. Trying to make any changes around the company are met with hoops to jump through and an unclear process. Even as a principal level engineer I found it difficult to make meaningful change. Nobody seems to be able to answer questions or you get different answers depending on who you ask. Nerdery markets itself as a partner, but often makes choices that are more profitable for Nerdery and not in the best interest of the client. Often times suggestions or warnings are made by devs and ignored by delivery leads or client partners. Nerdery also likes to market itself as innovative, but Nerdery as of late has lacked in that. It seemed like they were more interested in comparing themselves to other companies than forging a path driven by innovation. That lack of innovations comes into play in market offerings. They played catch up in Cloud and are still failing on putting out a decent offering. Often times they were chasing market trends than focusing on what they were good at. Nerdery has become focused on profit over everything. It became painfully obvious that they were trying to make their bottom line look good in order to sell. Talented people are treated as just another cost, just another number, and they lost a lot of talent because of it. Upper management doesn’t seem to be interested in change. They surround themselves with just more of the same, confirming their biases. Even the internal surveys they would twist the numbers to fit their narrative. A couple years I would have recommended Nerdery as a place to grow, but with the recent shifts in priorities, I can no longer say that. If you’re an up and coming developer, look at other places for opportunities.

Pros

1) A fair number of interesting opportunities to stretch my skills 2) Great colleagues who want to help 3) A real push to make the workforce diverse in an industry sector that typically isn't

Cons

1) Still a mix of "ordinary" work that can get tedious 2) A company in transition that still has some folks longing for the old days