rex Reviews

Boring and old paper trail systems

Note the company has repeatedly rebranded itself to fix its reputation with both external customers and as a tech company. Be sure to look at reviews for "Trustwork" to understand the continuity of the culture over several years. You may see very high results in a recent employment surveys or for the company "GetDone". GetDone was amazing, but was disbanded and discontinued just after those surveys were submitted, all business stopped abruptly and customers and pros cut off, then teams scattered throughout the other Rex "companies" which really function as small start up teams. You need to be VERY aware of what you are signing up for and make sure it is a good fit for what you are looking for. -Work/life balance is very poor with hourly emergency requests being made out of the blue that carry over into the evenings and weekend with demands that work be completed by first thing the next day often for arbitrary reasons. Its a flippant abuse of power from the top of the org to behave this way. -team members get moved across companies hourly to daily to weekly, so you and everyone else literally will be working on something new everyday. Eng/design/product has no chance to build any context at all. There is no user research, no design research, no validation of designs, no architectural design, no thought allowed at all, as these things are perceived as being too slow. You have to be okay throwing away what you did yesterday-like literally you were asked to stay up all night to finish it, then get told "well we dont need that after all" . Often you actually work late to finish the work to meet the last minute request, only to have it discarded and start over with a different rushed request the next day. This behavior really is to the level of being emotionally abusive to team members. This isnt a one-off thing...its been going on for five years and is EVERYWHERE in the org. Its not one person or one team-its literally impacting about 100 people over ten "companies" and has been going on for years. -People are hired, move across the country to work here, often with a huge desire to be part of the founders vision, only to be laid off after a few weeks with no comp or sev package and be stuck with no job or way to take care of their families. Sometimes it is because they spoke up about their concerns, but sometimes there isnt any good reason- just a knee jerk notion of "hey lets get rid of some overhead today". Make sure you have a solid backup plan as this could literally happen to anybody. -The founder is very brilliant and knows a lot about real estate and had good ideas. His friends know about how to run real estate companies, run for office and have read a book or two about startups. But nobody at the top actually understands how to run a software company (over 100 people at this point) or has any experience at other successful software companies. This would be ok if they hired good people(which they do) and then listened to them, rather then fire them. There is massive insecurity and ego at the top of the org and the feeling of overt threat, should you be a voice of dissent. -The Development process has the founder reviewing all epics, user stories and acceptance criteria before design can start. Then the founder has to review all designs before development can start. Then the founder has to approve all code before it gets pushed to production. In this process, its not a rubber stamp-literally teams get all their work thrown away because it didnt meet the idea in the founders mind. -All work is done in a manic, yet rigid waterfall manner. Teams are assigned explicit scope they must build, in a very proscribed way with little flexibility, after founder review, then are given strict deadlines for execution, often only 2-3 weeks out to build entire modules or new apps, with a set team of only 2-3 eng resources. Except then eng resources get shuffled every single week, so there is no consistency or ability to actually progress. Its really the ultimate "Deathmarch", except expanded across ten "companies". If you point out that the timelines are unrealistic the tagline of "Find a way or make one", aka "you job is on the line" so be prepared to work late and all weekend" is cited. Its not just toward a single deadline-once one date is reached, a new date just gets set and everybody goes again. The resulting code built is profoundly brittle, which would be ok for a functional prototype that is throwaway, but the entire mantra is cobble together very poorly coded work as fast as possible, sell it, then keep adding features on that to scale. Even the GetDone product was extremely brittle and poorly coded and non-scalable before it was killed. Its the ultimate in Sales driven development. -There is an intentional discard of good management principles. 1:1s were told to the whole org to be a waste of time, there are no growth plans for anybody. Many people literally have title changes and management changes every single week or multiple times a week, and often are not even certain who they report to. Its oddly not the most toxic place Ive seen because most people learn very quickly to keep their mouth shut and follow rule #1: "Nothing you are working on is ever going to actually matter or become a reality, so just be agreeable until it gets thrown away" and the individuals become pretty jovial after emerging from an initial round of WTF upon being hired. "Look busy, Jesus is coming" is sort of what everybody is doing. Then everybody blames the eng team when the deadlines fly by. -all of this is excused as being part of a 0-1 startup, but its really just absolute incompetence in managing or running a tech company. Many folks have come from 0-1 startups and know what right looks like, but get shutdown quickly. Honestly, its so unreal as to be really, really funny, as long as you arent the layoff of the week. Its madness! -Also, you will need to bring your own computer as they dont want to invest in buying one, which is a little odd.