Pearl Reviews

4.3

86% would recommend to a friend

(331 total reviews)
avatar

Andy Kurtzig

93% approve of CEO

72% positive business outlook

Pearl has an employee rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 331 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Pearl employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

331 reviews
2.0
1 Oct 2014

Awesome idea, poor execution, greedy leadership

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The idea has real potential and some day a company like JustAnswer will be as large as Amazon. There is freedom to experiment here, though the best ideas often don't get developed past a poorly made MVP. The work-life balance is exceptional and the Presidio location is unique. There is an inordinate amount of intelligent, engaging and caring people who work here.

Cons

The leadership, mainly CEO Andy Kurtzig, lacks imagination and a vision. Most products are developed based on his decisions. This means most products end up being different billing schemes or confusing subscription plans intended to squeeze money out of the customer. In one instance, an entire product team sent a letter of dissent to the executive team regarding a "feature" that would result in misled customers. They were forced to release the product anyway. There is an intentional disregard for quality product development; priority is always placed on the next billing plan or confusing up-sell that will bring in instant, short-term money. The desire for revenue, at all costs and all goodwill, is insatiable.

1.0
4 Feb 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Beautiful location and worker bees who really care about the company.

Cons

Last week they had a mass layoff. (30%) and 35+ employees lost their job. The severance: your final paycheck (not even paid until the end of the week) and 4 weeks pay. They also chose to layoff everyone with 3 days left in the month, so most people were screwed as the health care coverage was only good until the end of the month. (3 days later) As you see from every review for the last 2 years, the issue is obviously management's inability to deliver a vision that works. Unfortunately, the worker bees had to take the hit on this one. Just to give you an idea on the CEO's vision for 2014; he's listed 16 goals for the year in order of importance. Quality and Customer Satisfaction was #14 on that list. Basically, this company is out-sourcing all their engineers work over to the Ukraine. If you're an engineer, don't expect to be at Pearl long. I'm actually pretty embarrassed to have worked here.

2.0
30 Jan 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Fun consumer business, beautiful location, golden gate bridge views, smart employees, nice facility, gym, lunch

Cons

Smart leaders who created strategy and drove rapid growth left more than a year ago. Since then, no strategy, no innovation, negative growth, micro-managing founder/CEO, clueless management team, dormant board.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 331 Reviews

Glassdoor has 385 Pearl reviews submitted anonymously by Pearl employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Pearl is right for you.