SkyKick Reviews

Didn't innovate enough beyond their original products

The company is run entirely by directors hired through nepotism, rather than experience, competence or skill. These directors have created a top-down management structure where the primary goal is for their subordinates to make them feel important and powerful, rather than allowing employees the ability to work and think independently or provide constructive feedback without retaliation. Recruitment of new employees is based around selling the culture of "work hard play hard" and teasing recruits with the suggestion the options will soon be worth their weight in gold, in exchange for low starting salaries. They will claim these starting salaries are temporary until you "prove yourself" but in reality (and I know this from talking independently to two former recruiters) their primary goal is to hire previously unemployed employees at the lowest pay possible, and keep them underpaid for as long as possible. This has created a workforce mostly inexperienced and under-qualified to handle the issues and workloads placed upon them. Many, as I did, see the position as a worthwhile sacrifice, a stepping stone to a potential bright future of higher pay and higher status. It is not. To be fair, working at SkyKick seems like a lot of fun at first. After about a month everyone begins to see the overwhelming damage caused by years of awful mismanagement. There is no system, no process, no application that works in an efficient manner. Most of every employee's time is spent performing manual menial tasks that are sold to their customers as "automated services". As a support representative your job is effectively to continuously lie to customers, suggesting their issues with the product are unusual, or that their issues are related to a newly released feature that is designed to improve on existing processes. The bottom line is the technologies being sold only barely function and the unique niche of their particular type of service continues to attract new customers who don't know any better, and have few other options. New employees at SkyKick are pushed to the front lines to act as punching bags while the more experienced employees hide behind them and pretend like nothing's wrong while they drink free beer and play ping pong. Ultimately the worst part of working at SkyKick is the complete lack of standardized and objective measurement of employee performance. As a result, most employees realize that they don't need to do much work if they simply please the directors. This leaves a majority of the most difficult work to be left to a small subset of the newest and least experienced employees who are least able to handle the problems effectively. This structure has caused massive resentment from the individuals actually performing most of the work. And if anyone speaks up to say someone else is not pulling their weight, management turns a blind eye especially if that employee is good at pleasing the managers. About 1/2 the employees in the entire company do virtually nothing and are well respected in return. The other half do all the work and are not promoted if they have ever suggested the systems need improving or that others are not pulling their weight.