iHerb iReality Check - Software Developer iHerb Employee Review

Ready for a challenge? Come find it at iHerb! The projects are fast-paced and you’ll be working in chaotic “agile” sprints. Come churn features and navigate around technical debt because requirements are constantly changing. Feature done and ready for QA? Oh, wait... we have no QA. In an initiative to cut expenses the non-technical management thought they could get rid of QA and instead tell developers to do their own QA. That short sighted cost cutting attempt backfired with more bugs reaching production and decreased velocity so now management is trying to rehire a QA team. Any leader with a modicum of technical background would have seen those repercussions. Never mind QAing your finished work though, the product owner just changed the requirements again so you’re actually not really done! Don't take it personally though, it's not just you, it happens all the time. Unfortunately none of the product owners, tech leads, or scrum masters have the empowerment to own their product to prevent sudden "urgent" features and changes from creeping in mid-sprint directly from the CEO because "he wants it done". We do “agile”, we do agile the iHerb way! Being a ecommerce company, we take strong pride in our technical leadership! Our CTO is appointed through nepotism and is technically inept with no actual contribution to the product or technical direction of the platform or development teams. If you are a frontend developer then you're in luck! We provide great mentorship because our frontend teams are led by backend leads who don’t consider frontend developers “real” developers and constantly question why frontend work “takes so long” because, isn’t it “just” HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? Also why does the frontend need these unnecessary state management libraries? There's hardly any state that needs to be managed in the frontend because the backend handles all the heavy lifting! If this team culture sounds like a fit for you, then come on board! We need help tackling our legacy ASP.NET codebase because we're trying to move to React. That's what the cool kids are using! But you'll probably just be working through our jQuery codebase. Didn't I mention that we have no power in protecting our sprints and prioritizing tech debt burn down? So you'll just have to keep building "one more" feature in jQuery.... just this time because the owner really wants this "urgent" feature out. Let's reflect on our “Guiding Principles” at iHerb... DEVELOP AND HIRE THE BEST “Our success comes from our development of each individual to their full potential, and beyond. We continuously raise the bar with each new hire and promotion and we make investments for a long-term organization.” In reality iHerb management is largely non technical and doesn't understand the importance of mentoring individual team members. The emphasis is on expense reduction and profit maximization. QA was a cost, so the team was fired. Slack was a cost, so it was dropped. Good hardware is a cost, so only team leads get high end machines. Now it looks like management is seeing local US developers as a cost because the new push from management is to hire out teams of developers in China. Unfortunately these China developers write terrible code that the Irvine team needs to review. The China team can churn out features in days, but the code is unmaintainable. Non technical management doesn't understand this and management is pressuring the Irvine teams to keep up despite the fact that we are the ones having to review and fix the code, on top of our normal projects. The few technical leaders in management don't have any actual power so intentions to change the broken processes never come to reality. A company culture is built from the top down. Leaders beget team members, but bosses beget workers. iHerb executive-management boss, instead of lead, and this management culture trickles down to how directors relate, to team leads, and how team leads relate to employees. There are constant team transitions and manager changes without any transition handoff, so team members miss promotions opportunities because newly assigned managers aren't allowed to approve promotions until they can "assess the contributions" of their new team. This reoccurring problem of career growth has been an issue for more than two years yet despite all promises from HR, managers, and directors, there has been no change to help develop employees for long-term growth, development, and promotion. If you're looking to still grow in your software development career then look elsewhere. You'll end up in a decreased growth path at iHerb. We constantly lose good mid-level talent because the culture is stifling, and only senior developers are motivated to stay because iHerb's only real keeping power is the promise of 'phantom shares' and the above market salary for senior developers. Unfortunately, a healthy growing team doesn't consist on employees who feel the only motivation to stay is money. DELIGHT OUR CUSTOMER “We start with our Customer, and work backwards to guide our actions. We focus on earning our Customer's long-term trust, recognizing that it is hard to gain and easy to lose.” In reality iHerb solely focuses on maximizing profits, even at the expense of customer trust. The customer rewards program has changed multiple times in an attempt to scale back rewards, only to be reinstated again after customer sales drop. Whoever is making these decisions is just throwing darts trying to see what sticks. It definitely doesn’t feel like there’s any sort of strategy besides minimizing costs. An even more shortsighted decision was to cancel the once generous 20% employee discount. Instead employees now only get the standard 10% loyalty credit that applies to regular customers. Team members now rarely use iHerb and prefer to use Amazon. Even product owners have joked that they no longer use iHerb personally since Amazon prices are usually cheaper in the US which makes you wonder how well product teams really “know” the customer buying experience if they themselves don’t use iHerb. iHerb is successful in our overseas markets, but domestically, we all just use Amazon. Unfortunately analytics, metrics, and numbers don’t actually “guide” any processes since the CEO ignores metrics and recommendations from product owners and prefers to dictate product direction based on “what he feels”. This often leads to scrapped projects which eventually fail and are killed off (metrics would have told him that in the first place...) ARE PASSIONATE OWNERS “We act on behalf of the entire company at iHerb. We dive deep to the smallest meaningful detail as necessary by thinking like long-term owners.” In reality as employees we aren't empowered to own anything. Product owners don't have decision power to drive their initiatives and ideas. Developers don't have empowerment to share their feedback. The only authority comes from the CEO and his word trumps all. COMMIT, EVEN IF WE DISAGREE “We respectfully challenge each other to earn the responsibility of our actions. We recognize that disagreements can exist, but wholly commit to a decision once it has been made.” In reality if team members challenge the decisions of the CEO, even with sound metrics and data, he will ignore it and go his way. There are many "wholly committed" decisions that were built and then killed off after reaching production for a few days, and sometimes even after a few hours. ACT WITH URGENCY “Speed matters to our business and to our Customers. We have strong bias for action and take calculated risks to move with urgency on behalf of our business and our Customers.” In reality.... this part is true! The owner keeps the pressure on and developers are held to tight deadlines. We are constantly reminded to keep our lunch breaks on time, morning attendance at 9am in the morning, and departure at 6pm. This is not a, "as long as you get your work done" flexible work hours environment. CONTINUOUSLY INNOVATE “We are problem solvers across every aspect of our business. We continuously make improvements to offer the best selection, the best value, and the most convenient experience to our Customers.” In reality iHerb has great problem solvers but we unfortunately have no empowerment to act on our initiatives. FOCUS AND SIMPLIFY “We focus on our top priorities and simplify our actions. Complexity is the enemy of our speed, scalability, and Customer convenience.” In reality iHerb’s top priorities are whatever random feature the CEO wants. The jargon about complexity being the enemy of speed and scalability is empty talk. Our deployment process takes a dedicated developer at least a full day of their time each week because CI/CD is not invested in. Tech debt is not prioritized because technical leadership has no authority to get resources assigned to it. iHerb is primarily run by non-technical managers who don't understand that these aspects of tech debt eventually lead to complexity, which hinder scalability and speed. In their eyes, they just want "features features features". LEARN RELENTLESSLY “Success comes from lessons learned. We are self-critical and honest about our mistakes. We value the hard lessons learned from failures to relentlessly improve our path to long-term success.” In reality a company culture is built from the top down. Leaders beget team members, but bosses beget workers. What's worse is that iHerb managers have no experience in management because they were senior developers who had no other career path to take except management. A good developer does not make a good manager. ARE NOT WASTEFUL “We are resourceful and find ways to do more with less. We save long-term dollars tomorrow rather than cut short term pennies today.” In reality iHerb is one of the most wasteful organizations. Random projects from the owner are constantly scrapped because design and UX is not thought through properly until after development is finished and the owner realizes “I don’t like it, roll the feature back”. Management tries to save not be wasteful and save money by making short sighted decisions like firing QA and forcing developers to do our own QA. But again this just led to increased bugs reaching production, and increasing the time involved to rolling buggy features back and working on bug fixes. Management only believes they are not wasteful because they are non-technical and not only do they don’t understand the repercussions of their decisions, but management also doesn’t listen to team members’ feedback which would have highlighted these issues before they happened.