A "feature factory" with poor leadership
Pros
Unlimited PTO and work from home are nice perks, though leadership did not seem to like either. Most coworkers are friendly.
Cons
This is the very definition of a "feature factory." Leadership seems to have no interest in anything beyond the recurring revenue numbers going up and expenses going down. They care about this so much that they devote significant staff time to chasing down relatively small amounts; in other words, they spend their time and your time "chasing nickels around dollar bills." They'll spend thousands of dollars in staff time if it means getting expenses down by hundreds. More worrisome is the way they treat engineering problems. In the time I was there, they went through multiple variations of the same flawed plan, vaguely defined as moving the application to a public cloud (Azure, AWS, etc). Unfortunately, the application platform is built on a rotten foundation that makes this extra difficult to implement, though not impossible if resources can devote time to it. But instead engineers either get assigned to shiny new features or end up solving the same bugs over and over, most of which are own-goals from previous engineering leadership. Even with strong technical leadership though, Sertifi is unable to properly modernize the application. Instead, middle managers waste their time arguing over the causes of issues and how to fear future issues instead of working together to fix them. No one is actually incentivized to resolve issues. Leadership often makes that lack of incentive much worse, routinely refusing to staff up technology teams to meet their goals, even if the staff was appropriately budgeted for in the previous cycle in order to achieve those goals (this includes backfills for employees that leave, which they sneakily treat like net new positions). This gets further exacerbated by unrealistic timelines that, when combined with the small staff footprint, leads to missed deadlines and staff burnout. If you read all the not-at-all-suspiciously-timed positive reviews from the Customer Success team members, all of this might seem hard to believe--but Customer Success was one of the departments whose staff nearly fully turned over twice during my tenure at the company. Turnover is a serious problem all over the company and you'll be hard-pressed to find many employees who have been there for longer than 5 years. That should be embarrassing for a company that was founded in 2008. Sadly, I do not think it is. This is the same company that spent over a year without a head of HR and still refuses to hire one, which is additionally puzzling because compensation and benefits for a company of Sertifi's size and success are well below market rates. Low pay, low bonuses, bad & expensive health options (because they don't like kicking in much money), and very few significant pay raises for those that deserve it...this is one of those companies that tries to give people promotions without corresponding pay bumps. These are just a selection of issues I encountered and tried to help resolve while I worked there. It would be bad enough for Sertifi to have all of these issues but what is worse is that they know about them. It took me far too long to realize the problems weren't being resolved because that's the way leadership wants it. Company leadership was informed about these issues and more time and time again; they chose to do nothing. The company is like this because those in charge choose it to be. That is very sad.
