Pros
- There are some genuinely intelligent, passionate, hardworking people at Ranker who do their best to create good content. - If you're looking for an entry level position in editing or social media, they'll hire you if you're smart and you can get some experience - There's a decent snack selection in the kitchen
Cons
Ranker pays well below market rate for writers and editors. Once, a manager described associate editors in a meeting as "just bodies in chairs." That should give you an idea of the ingrained toxicity in the company. Ranker expects editors to work long hours (usually 9-6 if you eat lunch at your desk) and adhere to Byzantine management structure and guidelines. This is while being paid literally minimum wage in some cases. If you raise a complaint, the most common response is "this is just how things work at a start up." The thing is, the company has been around for 10 years and has around 100 employees. Editors are treated like second-class citizens. People in other departments look down on editorial, and employees are referred to as "the kids" in upper management meetings. To be clear, 28-year-old professional editors are called children by their employers. It's a running joke that members of the product and dev teams can basically get away with whatever they want. They once got a pizza party because the team members showed up to the office before 10:30 AM. Seriously. There's a gross imbalance in the way certain members of the company are treated. That's not a millennial snowflake perspective. No one's expecting day care. They're just expecting to be fairly compensated for hard work. That's to say nothing of the casual sexism and racism. It's very much a boys' club, with all that entails. Once during a meeting the CEO stopped to ask every woman in the room what they thought of doing a makeup vertical. Because girl stuff. Another time while introducing a new employee to the company (she was of Korean heritage), he suggested that she start a K-Pop group with the office manager (who also happened to be Korean). Women are consistently described as either "emotional" or "too quiet" in performance reviews, and God forbid you try to speak up during a meeting while white men are talking. A real fun time. Also, the content itself is soul-sucking. Management won't pay decent rates for writers, so editors are sometimes forced to re-write entire pieces. The whole operation is myopically focused on Facebook traffic, which explains why they grew too quickly too fast and have since had to lay off employees. TL;DR - Avoid Ranker at all costs. It's a sinking ship and the ride down will be awful.