Pros
The work/life balance is very reasonable. Unless you’re a manager or director, you’ll likely work a 40 hour week. The free lunch is a huge bonus. The office is beautiful. It’s a LEED-certified building with a bio wall, automatic window shades, a custom mural, and bright colors everywhere. The equipment you get is great—everything from the MacBook pro to the standing desks and Aeron chairs. The leadership truly cares about their customers. AWeber supports community services projects and local outreach. We fundraise for non-profits and volunteer for local high schools.
Cons
First and foremost, it’s upsetting to see accusations of sexual harassment and racism on here. I really hope you reported these incidents to HR or your manager. AWeber can’t address those problems if they don’t know about them. Pay at AWeber is low. AWeber spends money parties, games, free lunch, and slides but doesn’t pay all employees competitively. As a result, some people leave for better offers. The CEO exhibits unethical and unprofessional behaviors. He has the potential to be a much better leader. He needs leadership training, badly. Building slides and giving away free lunch doesn’t make you a good CEO or a good leader. It just means you’ve decided to build slides and give away free lunch. Here are some examples of the CEO’s behaviors: Nasty all-hands emails: The CEO sent a reproachful email to the entire company about walking on the grass instead of walking on the sidewalks. Keep in mind that some employees have little to no interaction with the CEO. So one of the few times they hear from him is via a finger-wagging email about walking on the grass. Nasty individual emails: The CEO sends nasty email to individuals when they make mistakes, and not just any old email. It’s a scolding email with liberal use of “!!!” and “???” Firings: The CEO lets many people go. Sometimes there are mass firings. Sometimes people are fired individually. Sometimes people disappear without explanation. Person X disappears, and then someone notices that person X is gone. People quietly ask questions about person X. Eventually you find someone who knows what happened: “Oh yeah, person X was let go a few weeks ago.” At least 20 people have been let go in my time here. Working remotely for months: The CEO goes away with his family every summer. He works remotely there for several months. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that AWeber frowns upon working from home. They allow it, but reluctantly. It doesn’t seem fair that the CEO works remotely several months a year, and yet we have to fight sometimes to work from home on days we have doctor appointments. Hiding laptops: There’s a rule at AWeber that your screen must be password-protected when you’re away from your laptop. The CEO used to mess with people’s laptops if they left them unlocked. For instance, he’d put a bizarre photo on their desktop. Then it got worse. He began hiding people’s laptops if they walked away without locking them. People would return to their desks to find their laptops gone. The CEO would hide them somewhere in the office and make people hunt them down. Seriously. People were furious about this. They felt humiliated and defeated. Eventually someone confronted the CEO about how messed up it was to hide people’s laptops. He then made it an official policy to lock your machine or else you were written up (which is better than being humiliated in front of your peers, I guess). Corporal punishment: Some folks here watched a movie every Friday afternoon in the movie room. They watched the movie while working on their laptops. Then one day the CEO told them not to. There was never an explanation other than whisper down the lane mumblings of “The CEO put a stop to it.” Perks are taken away from everyone due to the actions of a few. Decisions are made without transparent reasons. This breeds rumors and speculation among the employees here.