ActiveCampaign is Chicago's worst tech company.
Leadership has absolutely no idea how to run the business. Employees are overworked and quitting in droves. Pay is substandard. Layoffs are rampant, happening over, and over, and over again, laying off some of the most important people in the company with total disregard.
The code is almost 100% technical debt, with absolutely zero company best standards or practices or required test coverage. Massive moving to outsourcing and contract hires, too, which has made the already fragile and hard to change code even worse. The use of poorly reviewed generative AI built code has increased this problem even more, by now not only drenching the codebase in poorly written human code, but even worse AI slop code, in which the developers who committed don't even know how it works.
As a developer, you will be paged almost every day, often in late sleeping hours and weekends, for long and severe incidents.
Managers are largely ladder climbers. Deadlines are unrealistic and projects are routinely cancelled after massive amounts of money and time have been wasted on them. People are unhappy and stressed. There is little room for career growth. Managers treat you like tools, instead of people. There have been some really bad sexist incidents from high leadership, leading one of my ex female coworkers to just flat out quit.
The company micromanages you too, asking you to record every breath you take (sorry, I guess Jira isn't enough). Releases often lead to massive breaking of functionality and customer outages. There are no dedicated SDET. Most of what is released to Production is just rubber stamped as "APPROVED!" without any real code review.
There has been massive investment in AI, even though customer report-backs from social media sites like Reddit seem very un-interested in it, while real customer demands, like less buggy and slow software and more modern UI and less complicated workflows get completely ignored.
There is almost zero transparency on the actual company ARR, too, with the company using a secret formula to determine how well it is doing each quarter, so as an employee of ActiveCampaign, you are always left in the dark.
Post covid, there has also been rampant cost cutting, with many benefits being slashed, and annual raising falling dramatically. And of course, with all the layoffs, including of developers, DevOps, etc. you're constantly living in fear and anxiety, wondering if your job is next on the chopping board.
Overall, truly a terrible place to work. It runs its business by doing the exact opposite of everything a good SaaS and tech company should do. Do not work at ActiveCampaign! You will be absolutely miserable and be trapped in a dead end job.
And if you are still at ActiveCampaign, good luck; by crippling yourself staying at a dead end company for so long, you're dooming your future of being able to have the actual skills are experience you will need to work anywhere else, like at a real software company, that actually knows how to build software.
