Online Rewards Reviews

As a former employee, I find it humorous that this company used Star Wars memes and other nerd culture steadfasts in their limited recruiting efforts. It’s particularly funny as the company’s story mirrors the narrative of Anakin Skywalker himself. Online Rewards is the drama of a once-promising, passionate, gifted group of individuals that sacrificed the best parts of themselves only to give in to the stygian allure of quick profits, coasting over performing, process as a ritual, arrogance, indifference to morale, technological stagnation, and outright abuse. I was present to witness how - despite the best efforts of many employees - management ignored corporate best practices, constructive feedback, interpersonal concerns, career path concerns, and outright sexual harassment to the detriment of the entire organization. I go into detail here not to overtly berate this organization, but to help it understand where and how they have failed and are failing their employees and customers. Quick Profits Profits. Most companies exist to generate profit. That’s not a bad thing. It only becomes bad when all other imperatives and needs in an organization are sacrificed to gain a quick profit. Any long term goal that Online Rewards would create for itself would ultimately be sabotaged by the hijacking of talent and time in order to implement or deliver a new product. These deliverables were often for an entity that was willing to sign a check provided there was a quick turnaround time. To give a sense of how detrimental this was, the company postponed refreshing/updating their technology stack for over a decade because the development talent wasn’t available in order to tackle this serious task. This sabotage also interrupted the service that the company was obligated to deliver to smaller clients because the talent was diverted elsewhere. Oftentimes this turned project managers into professional apologists; their schedules full of meetings for the sole purpose of apologizing to clients and proposing new project timelines. What’s worse, some of this sabotage was directly caused by management themselves. It was not unheard of for decision makers to personally contact developers that were previously engaged on one assignment only to force them to attend to an immediate need (e.g. product mock-ups, proofs of concept, immediate product changes). The general impression from most of the employees was that they needed to be ready to apologize/give up their current work at the whim of an out-of-control leader. Efforts to curtail this behavior were implemented… and then subsequently ignored when inconvenient. Coasting Over Performing The moment you step into the Cincinnati office, you are bombarded with “Inc. 500” awards for “Fastest Growing Company.” This is quite the bragging right… if your company is eight years old (the average age of a company on this metric - Online Rewards is nearing 20). While the organization loves to tout this achievement, all it does is highlight how serious the previous issue is. This award simply assesses profit increases over a defined window of time. That’s it. When you look at the web sites and marketing material for Online Rewards’ competitors, you will see them proudly touting awards for “Best Solution in Industry”, accolades from research firms like G2, “Best Software Solution,” and other product and service based awards. Online Rewards has none of these. In fact, this organization has had numerous issues with its products. One of the most infamous incidents of product instability was when the company’s mobile apps were delisted from app stores due improper product ideation and preparation. This would normally be an embarrassing and organization-altering failure in any other software company, but this was merely another day-of-the-week in Online Rewards. Instead of spending time delivering quality, robust, feature-filled products, this organization prefers to take the quickest route to a signed contract. This has led to employees working with a poor tech stack, awful internal tooling, an unproven core architecture, stillborn business processes, and products whose few claims to fame are visual customization and quick turnaround time. Even then, that “quick turnaround time” is often a lie of omission. It isn’t out of the ordinary for many products to be delivered in a barely-functional state. Management has no problem asking employees to spend time outside of business hours rehabilitating a crippled deliverable. Good software houses would find this appalling and unacceptable… but then that’s why they’re good. It’s difficult to care about your work when you know that your client is essentially buying a ‘customized brick’, but that’s what managers would insist that we do. There was no incentive to do anything other than the bare minimum or be “good enough to not get fired.” Process as a Ritual Given the processes that I was exposed to during my time at this company, I am extremely skeptical as to the legitimacy of the degrees and certifications (if any) that some managers claim to have attained. The processes used to be very minimal and hailed from the time from when the company was a mere startup. Given that these early processes couldn’t scale, there was an attempt to implement more robust business processes that also satisfied the requirements of SOC II. This was an apocalyptic disaster. I do not use that adjective lightly. The policies and processes put into place were copy-pasted (this was a verbatim admission from an anonymous manager) from the most draconian boilerplate examples they could find. Here are some egregious offenders: - Machines were locked down to the point of becoming a choke point on employee performance - Code reviews were required for any change to any code that was used in any context (even purely internal helpers) - Ticket and issue management became siloed to the extreme - Mobile access was completely cut off (unless you were one of the ‘favorites’) - Developers were at the mercy of a helpdesk if their tool-chains broke - Quality assurance employees became glorified rubber-stampers - Account managers were completely in the dark as to the status of basic support issues and development progress - Support was completely cut off from most internal support tooling (yes. support itself had their access to certain support tools revoked) - Project managers were forced to focus on timelines instead of deliverable / project integrity I could go on and on, but this point has been made. Multiple attempts were made to plead for more workable and less siloed procedures, but they fell on either deaf or dismissive ears. Online Rewards crippled itself with poor process implementation and chose to double down on it instead of listening to the employees and fixing it. Arrogance / Out of Touch I knew that management was out of touch when I was informed of a technical group meeting where they told employees that they were more than welcome to create their own technical presentations. That proposition was aggravating to many in attendance. It was made clear to the technical folks that managers had no clue what employees were doing with their time and simply assumed that they had the bandwidth to budget in extras like education and research. This was far from the truth. Management would often make completely bald assertions about the time that employees had to get their tasks done. I cannot emphasize how quickly my confidence in the management eroded when they would make these baseless guesses that they bizarrely called ‘estimates.’ What’s more, even when employees would approach management about issues like these they were often ignored, given some half-hearted excuse, or were given a promise to re-evaluate the issue. When there were questions about the absence of career paths and advancement opportunities, management promised to implement a way to advance in the company. When there were concerns about the age of the tech stack, management went through the motions of attempting to address the issue. When there were requests for more educational opportunities, management placated us by listing it as a ‘goal’ in a forgotten quarterly meeting. The result of these meetings? The company retained its career dead-end and clunky flat hierarchy, the tech stack stagnated for four more years, and the only educational solutions offered were ‘free’ courses to be completed on the employee’s own time. These results only cemented the reputation of management as being ineffective at best or outright liars at worst. Indifference to Morale As can be interpreted from the previous section, many employees had a very low level of work satisfaction. Most people accepted that the interpersonal dynamics and business structure were permanently broken and that the only redeeming value of their job was that it would be tough to get fired. This fostered an environment where people were consistently pessimistic, passive-aggressive, depressed, and fatalistic. Despite this, employees made attempts to discuss the low morale with management. Unfortunately, concerns about process, job value, cliquiness, passive aggressive behavior, and other types of abuse were either denied or dismissed with a typical ‘promise to look into it.’ In the best case, the results of these meetings would be a slight change in behavior for about two weeks. Then the situation would steadily revert back to where it started. It didn’t help that there was (and most likely still is) a perception of a management ‘clique’ that would only listen to feedback from specific people and not others. This perception only grew as managers made more baseless assertions, dismissed more issues, and refused to address glaring process problems. These issues were not always true for a certain class of employees, however. If one was a back-end developer, one would be treated as a first class citizen whose time, opinions, and department were treated with kid gloves. It was shocking to witness the dichotomy between this class of employee and every other employee in the company. If a back-end developer felt that their time was being wasted, management came down hard on perceived offenders. If a back-end developer felt that their objections weren’t heard, management would step in and correct course over everyone else’s objections. This gap in respect was even more apparent when contrasted with the way that front-end developers were regarded. Even though they too were developers, we discovered that they had no UX direction, no front-end leads, and were lectured to by - what they perceived to be - backend developers with naught but strong opinions based on personal preference instead of research, data, and general UX competency. It was obvious that only a certain, specific type of employee had favor in the entire organization… and it came at the cost of the account managers, support representatives, front-end developers, and the numerous other critical roles manned by talented people. Technological Stagnation With profit being the one and only priority in the org, this left employees with a fragile, unproven, and aging technology stack. Aside from the obvious problems of using outdated technology to build products, it also stagnated employee growth. What experience would a developer have to show in regards to modern practices, frameworks, tools, or languages when they’re forced to use obsolete software and practices? Not only was the org stuck with using this terrible stack, but the processes put in place ate up every second of every day, eliminating time to do research and implement new solutions unless employees chose to do it on their own time. This also resulted in the company having few to no popular integrations and selling points for workplaces that used popular collaboration and communication suites. Even when employees came up with new ideas and features for existing and new products, they were often ignored. New integration came in only when signing clients demanded them, and they were often clumsily shoe-horned into the already clunky system. Online Rewards made it clear that their business model was one of being the lowest bidder... and their tech definitely highlighted this. Abuse This is a subject I do not take lightly. While many interpersonal conflicts were addressed between non-management employees (credit where credit is due), this standard vanished when one of the concerned parties was in management itself. From the perspective of employees, becoming a manager was perceived not as a promotion, but as an initiation into the management clique. It was not unusual to endure consistent passive-aggressive comments from certain managers while carrying out your day-to-day tasks. In fact, certain employee roles were guaranteed to be talked down to and crudely insulted. What’s worse, this abuse often increased in frequency if the target was female. It’s a horrific irony that a company which develops employee recognition software creates an environment where recognition seems two-faced and back-handed. Employees often would go from enduring a petulant tirade over the phone, to suddenly seeing a recognition for you from the same individuals. That’s borderline psychotic behavior. That’s not the worst of it, however. While the company may have a sexual harassment policy, there are unwritten rules stating just whom is beholden to said policy. It’s pretty bad when you have managers stopping by women’s desks, telling them that certain employees will be visiting, and that they should make themselves scarce or wear something loose. Why aren’t the managers and leadership holding people accountable instead of tacitly abiding groping, suggestive comments, and discrimination? If you go around telling people how to make themselves scarce or what to wear to avoid harassment, YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. Who are employees supposed to turn to when the managers or leadership itself are simply accessories to their abuse?