Wowzers Reviews

2.2

15% would recommend to a friend

(15 total reviews)

Andrew Howard

28% approve of CEO

31% positive business outlook

Wowzers has an employee rating of 2.2 out of 5 stars, based on 15 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Wowzers employee rating is 43% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

15 reviews
1.0
10 Dec 2014

A great example of what not to do.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There is one, almost unanimous, pro to wowzers...and that is the team. This was by far, the youngest, most talented, intelligent, and fun group of developers. Everyone has bright futures ahead of them as experts in their fields. Despite numerous obstacles, oppressive working conditions, and managements inexperience consistently moving the product towards failure, this team kept this company alive. In my opinion, this was the only pro to working for Wowzers.

Cons

The code base: As a developer, the code base was extremely disorganized, proprietary (more so than usual), hugely over complicated, and therefore difficult to work with. You will not be able to join this company and learn the code base quickly, it can take several months to learn how it all comes together. The reason it is like this is because of the wide range of development experience with Actionscript and OOP paradigms. The majority of the engine is lacking in good design, and features that keep it closed for modification, but open for extension. Conversely, some of the engine is very elegant in its latter development components. Upper management: During company changes and moving to new office locations, the development team was asked to move their equipment, desks, and chairs. The upper management would not hire a moving service. Not only is this extremely unprofessional, but it has happened multiple times. The current office location is an apartment, which is not a conducive working environment. Do not expect your opinions about working conditions to be heard. Unfortunately, upper management knows very little about software development. They have a "my way or the highway" approach to this product and the team, which is where most of the problems stem from (ie - premature releases of the product, low team morale, etc). Extremely low team morale: If this company is around for any longer, it won't be with the current team. The changes in the company have been very inhospitable. Employees have the ability to work entirely remotely if you are not on the development team. The development team on the other hand has to be in the "office" as upper management decides for each week, despite it being almost completely unnecessary due to limited crossover between roles. Other cons include: Almost no benefits besides the basics Low pay (Much lower than industry standard) Often times working on weekends as senior developers to meet deadlines

2.0
12 Feb 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Like all the other reviews state my co-workers were amazing, talented, and fun people to have the honor working with. The product has a lot of strengths but poor management decisions and extremely rushed planning made what could be an amazing fairly unpolished. If you are in good standing with management they are fairly flexible about time off and over time they may raise your wages closer to industry standards but this is very much based on trivial things such as likability and how many hours you put in rather than the quality of work that is produced by the employee. Very friendly and knowledgeable lower management on the team. If they were given more ownership over decisions for the product it would be a much better polished and functioning piece of software.

Cons

Very poor planning. Management does not want to "waste time" with planning. A very juvenile sense of direction with the product. One day they may wish to make the most elaborate piece of software they can think of then the next day get estimates on the project and decide to gut the features discussed or figure out a very unstable "patch" solution to the problem. Employees are thought to be extremely replaceable even highly skilled and experienced veterans of the company are not valued. Benefits are very poor for tech and game industry. After hours company events tend to be very juvenile to the point were employee are asked to do embarrassing things in public that do not what so ever help team morale.

4.0
26 Aug 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are two development teams: webdev and content. I was on the webdev team so I can not comment on content. The pros were hardly any meetings... just 1-3 scrums per week and that was it. Lunch times were flexible. No pressure to work outside of normal business hours (8-5) which is unusual in tech. Fantastic location in River North.

Cons

I only stayed around 4 months, take this with a grain of salt. I was happy with management. They were professional and left me alone to do my job. I don't really understand why so many other reviews here were so negative about management. However, they have a BIG problem with turnover. They seem to just hire people without thorough interviews with the idea of hiring many and letting go of the ones they don't like. Myself, I was brought in as a jr dev at the same time as another jr dev. The other jr was clearly faster and better than me, so naturally they kept him and dropped me. The team lead and I had bad chemistry. She was aways berating my work in front of coworkers which made me nervous to the point of appearing stupid. At the same time, she was overly kind and gracious to the "better" jr dev which made me feel like Cinderella. Also, the codebase is overly complex. They need to just start over instead of just keeping on adding to the spaghetti code.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 15 Reviews

Glassdoor has 15 Wowzers reviews submitted anonymously by Wowzers employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Wowzers is right for you.