Shoelace Reviews

My experience working at Shoelace has scarred me. All of the negative reviews are completely spot-on. It is run by a small group of friends that do not care about your skills, how hard you work, or your dedication. They do not care to set you up for success unless you are one of the core group members (spots are all taken, btw). The moment one of them decides they don't like you, they leave you out of activities, ignore you, stop inviting you to lunch, and completely set you up to fail. It's easy to tell yourself you don't care about their opinion because this isn't high school, but it feels like high school there.. and it hurts. I have been sitting with these feelings for well over a year, and although I have moved on to bigger and better, I still think about my time there and how much it affected my confidence, mental health, and overall well being. The product itself is wrought with bugs and barely works behind the scenes, and once you realize it's just tinkering with Facebook with no real personal touch, attention, or effort, a company can easily do this by themselves. The C-suites win you over at the beginning. I remember in my interview, they said "we already love you. we just want to get you to love us". But all that positivity and care soon disappears and you realize they're barely ever around (which is abnormal of a company that size) and they truly don't care about you at all. However, if you are a young, fresh, naive, attractive woman, the founders will ensure you receive plenty of (potentially unwanted) attention. They are slimy, misogynistic bros that never really grew up so they don't care if you have either. They seem to just be there for a good time and treat everything as a party. Their attempts to have actual meetings and scrums and roadmap discussions are phoney and baseless and immature. Truly surprised to see this company is still up and running. It feels like the clock is ticking and the party will wrap up soon.

- Incompetent management that tries to assert its dominance every time it feels threatened: even if we all know it comes from a place of fear and insecurity, this isn't excusable let alone professional. Undeveloped leadership skills (especially from a laughable and failed ex-management consultant) results precisely in micromanagement and an insufferable work culture. - Should you dare disagree with anything they say at any time, they will find a way to fire you to save their ego. They'll make up a story to cover their behinds the next morning and try to convince themselves they've succeeded in solidifying group-think amongst their cattle. Seen it happen way to many times to too many people. Conversely, this happens to also be the exact reason why all of this company's top talent from pretty much every department (product, engineering, sales, marketing, CS) have already left ages ago on their own accord. - Salaries under industry standard across all departments. So disgustingly slimey they wouldn't honour contracts terms for performance reviews yet happily shells out tons of money for failed commercials, catered meals, and other superbly material things. *chef's kiss* - Let's talk more specifically about the product though in case you're not fully convinced yet. The CEO's woeful bout of Napoleon Complex has led to a do-as-I-say product direction that lacks anything important like, hmm let's say some small little things like data, validation, research, testing. He's not the messiah we know he'd like to us all to believe, or else this 5 year-old "start-up" would already be profitable. - Be smart about where you spend your time and talent. Avoid at all costs and don't repeat our mistakes. Everyone's waiting for the right time to get out of this s[t]inking ship: don't get in.