Mediocre, frustrating politics - Back End Engineer Cadent Employee Review

1.0
May 24, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Laidback startup-like office atmosphere for the most part, located in Center City - Most coworkers are friendly and willing to collaborate, very social environment, some good office events - Environment is very conducive to learning if you take the initiative

Cons

- It seems that lower/mid management are all lacking in people skills and have a desire to exert control over employees and keep them in check by nitpicking about pointless things that don't actually benefit the business - It seems senior management is mostly oblivious to everything and cares more about appearances - Product/project management employees are good at what they do, but the general requirements/tasking they're currently working with seems a bit disorganized - The existing codebase isn't of very great quality due to consistent prioritizing of short-term feature delivery over long-term code quality and design. A bit of a disconnect between the business people and the developers - Tons of outdated/disorganized documentation and code as a result of multiple acquisitions, knowledge drain, and fragmented products/teams - It seems there's a little bit of an inner circle kind of thing going on and office politics at play - The job description provided was somewhat misleading

Explore other reviews about Cadent

5.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Hybrid, nice office, nice people, good work life balance

Cons

The promotion criteria were not clearly established.

1.0
Jun 22, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Only pro is the actual staff themselves. Employees care and it is the only reason Cadent is floating.

Cons

Management is deluded. Leadership recently told employees that if they even tried to ask for more money that they wouldn’t get it and if they’re not ok with that then they are cool with people leaving. Hence why so many amazing people left within the last few months. Raises were terrible, promotions were a dime a dozen. Now they’re demanding people to come into the office 4 days a week. Culture at the top is just one big group of people all saying yes to each other and not once taking employee satisfaction into the equation. There is 0 transparency from all parties. No rhyme or reason to why certain goals are so high (and unachievable). HR continues to send out these nonsense employee engagement surveys and not take a single thing into consideration. They just dance around the point with a lot of corporate jargon and employees never see tangible actions being taken. Middle managers are clueless as well. They have no say or even understanding about why certain things are the way they are. When you have an actual problem or need something to be addressed, they do not help in the slightest. When raises/promotions came out earlier this year they already were prepared for backlash from employees about how terrible they were and knew there was going to be employee drop off but management didn’t care. Cadent wants to move into a video-only direction when a majority of their business is built on standard programmatic display campaigns. No idea how that will pan out. Either way, don’t work here. All the smart and good people from AdTheorent and some of the OG Cadent folks have bailed cause it is a sinking ship.

2
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All