Supposedly Christian company that takes advantage of their workers and goes to lengths to ostracize the non-religious - Anonymous employee Liferay Employee Review

1.0
Aug 10, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Met some good people I'm still friends with Stepping stone to work at a professional company I still miss Diamond Bar and Rowland for the amazing food every lunchtime

Cons

Paid far below industry standard, preyed on people during economic downturn (hired people with CompSci degrees as QA, then forced them to do coding work for no extra pay or benefit) Draconian Christian C-levels and managers, mandatory company retreats (to bible colleges, everytime), company-wide prayers; please, PLEASE expect to be treated differently if you don't subscribe to their dogma! I had the co-founder of the company tell me in front of my entire department at one of these bible college retreats that he wanted me to live a fulfilling life (implying I wasn't), and that only Liferay and Christ could do that for me. I was told at the same meet by the same egoist that ethic is impossible to have without religion, and that athiests are amoral. Remember, this is the co-founder. There was also an incident where one of my coworkers dispersed my personal information yelling in an auditorium details of my insurance and health plan. When I angrily relayed this to my manager, nothing was concrete was done, as the perpetrator was one of his high school church friends. There were other incidents: a pair of brothers who worked there, who also were church friends. These two brothers brought a machete to work once, had pictures of guns as their icons, constantly talked about guns in work chats, and one set his profile to, I quote, "kicking down doors in islamabad derka derka derka". Nothing was done to rectify these situations because these two were in-clique. In contrast, I was having an extraordinary toothache one morning, and had to make an emergency visit to the dentist. I let my managers know about this with an email. They called me into a meeting soon after I had come back to work, same day; they were extraordinarily angry that I had not "requested" the time from them first, even though I had sent them an email informing them I wanted to use sick time. As they had not replied back to me, my going to the dentist was "defying" them, and they wrote me up for visiting the dentist when I was experiencing agony (my crown had fallen off). After they stonewalled my worry and my questions, after half the day they came back to me and said that they were going to be "gracious" and not write me up... again, for an emergency that I had notified them about prior to coming in. Do not trust their reviews - they will lie to your face in bi-weekly reviews (held with two supervisors!) and then let you go without warning. The spineless manager wouldn't even look me in the eye when they let me go, and excused himself from the room ASAP without answering any of my questions, as even being on good terms with him and working under him for a year did not obligate him to give me a moment more of his time. They attempted to withhold unemployment from me immediately following this as well.

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Liferay Response
8y
Thanks for your candid feedback. We're glad you met some good people that you say you're still friends with and that Liferay was a good stepping stone for your career. On the con side, it sounds like there were some pretty frustrating times for you and that's unfortunate, since we want everyone at Liferay to feel stretched, developed, and included. While it's hard to address the specific situations without knowing all the details, we can say that in the past few years we've spent extra effort training managers to be better managers and looking for ways to help all employees feel engaged working here. Best wishes in your career.

Explore other reviews about Liferay

5.0
Feb 3, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good work environment, friendly coworkers, good benefits

Cons

Salary raises always promised next year, rarely given

3.0
Jun 26, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Been a while since I was there. But it was legitimately an amazing culture. I feel like this being my first job set the bar really high for what a work culture could be like. Christmas gifts. Summer Fridays. Team game sessions. It was awesome. And the people there were really friendly. They also gave bonuses for good performance, which from my experience weren’t hard to get. Starting as a Tester, it wasn’t hard to move up if you showed promise. The work was challenging enough to let you grow without overwhelming you. And it was easy to move up if you proved yourself.

Cons

Low pay starting out as a Tester. Like a few dollars above what I could have been making at a McDonald’s. They brought in young and inexperienced people though so we weren’t as concerned as we should have been. This was pretty much solely for complete beginners in the field. And the pay really reflected that. But even if you proved you could do the work and do it well, the pay ceiling was still painfully low. The pay pretty much was the only thing that stopped this from being the perfect job in my experience. Then they let go of almost all of QA one day. From what I hear it’s an entirely different company now.

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