Golden Frog Reviews

Do you enjoy working in a high-stress environment? Are intimidation tactics, backstabbing, and arrogant executives an absolute must in your American Dream? Will knowing your manager is utterly inflexible gear you up for time away from your family? If your life is incomplete without a daily dose of nerve-wracking metrics and corporate condescension, this is the perfect company for you! Don't miss your opportunity to work at a place where the customers hate you and your personal wellness doesn't matter. Where honesty and integrity make you a target for opportunistic, manipulative sharks. Where bosses say, in no uncertain terms, it's perfectly acceptable to 'punch down' the average worker because the upper echelon is more successful. [ “Hold up,” I hear you protest, perhaps sporting wide eyes or a furrowed brow. “Pump the hyperbolic brakes. They say *what*?” No hyperbole, dear reader. Spoken from the mouth of a recently hired manager: it is perfectly acceptable to 'punch down' the average worker because the upper echelon is more successful. And I still have four and a half years of backlogged bullcrapery to market to you. I can't pull my own punches now given I've held them coiled tight in my bones so long. Shall I? “Proceed . . .” ] That’s not all! Take a peek at these outstanding perks! - Slog through thankless, tedious 12-hour shifts on the support team while you rely on superficial loyalty to give you the thinnest hope you’ll transition to other departments - Battle governments and your employer alike in a no-win IP Cat-and-Mouse game as a SysAdmin - Scramble to meet unreasonable deadlines from the discomfort of the marketing department - Receive mediocre benefits for yourself; add family to your insurance plan at an absurd rate - Prepare for guilt trips and warnings about attendance when you use PTO to see to your personal wellness - Weather hurricanes of revolving supervisors - Grit your teeth against Holier Than Thou attitudes - Bask in passive-aggressive reminders that your contributions aren't good enough (Protip: you never will be good enough) - Endure ambush-style retaliation after you ask for guidance from execs - Shoulder blame, all 100%, for all incidents despite management’s equal or greater culpability For everyone else: your life is too short to spend it toiling in this radioactive wasteland. -- For obvious reasons, all these negative reviews aren't going to cease their familiar themes. Hostility with a smile and CYA culture both still thrive near the top. The company turns on employees at the drop of a hat. Maybe someone can code them a conscience? Until that time, you must make kissing CEO posteriors your life’s ambition in order to succeed here. Otherwise, you're fodder. They'll pull you into an ambush-style meeting with HR regarding your performance faster than you can spit. There, they might insist you have nothing to worry about, that “this isn’t a warning,” yet still demand your signature on an agreement about improving your performance based on their arbitrary goals so they can throw it back in your face when it suits them. One manager they brought in a few months ago was the catalyst for just such an ambush against myself. The new manager is an unpalatable brew of abrasive, micro-managerial, inflexible, disingenuous, and inconsiderate. They turn teachable moments into insults while beaming a false Big Business smirk and, true to form, heap every ounce of blame on those employees. In other words: perfect for the execs. My four and a half years of commitment held ZERO clout against the new manager in that room. The experience put such a sour taste in my mouth that I promptly took my leave. Icing on the Disappointment Cake? The turnover for the dwindling support team got so bad that the department began to drown in customer complaints over the summer. While the powers that be threw more money at sales, they also pulled former support agents from their current work in other departments to respond to tickets. Which I guess is cool because a return to battle against enraged users is precisely what workers look forward to after they've escaped support’s gnashing maw.

When I say CEO, I am referring to Sunday Yokubaitis. When I say Leadership, I am referring to the CEO, VPs, and Director-level roles. There are previous and current Leaders/employees at Golden Frog that can very easily substantiate the things I have put in this review. Most (if not all) decisions made by the Leadership are short-sighted; you will see that in the rest of this post. --- Leadership treats many decisions as ripping off a band-aid -- doing something that in the moment is harsh, but they think in the long run will be good for the organization. In truth, a better metaphor for their actions would be a small blade slicing at a new part of the body every single day. And that is how you can describe the impact that the Leadership group makes on the morale at Golden Frog -- as one former leader put it: death from a 1,000 cuts. And to be clear, the fish rots at the head. Many Leaders have come and gone in the business, but the morale and culture remain the same, because of the person running the company -- he is the common denominator. The CEO creates a culture of fear that constantly leads the VPs and Directors to make bad/rash decisions. I've had multiple leaders (ones that have left Golden Frog, and ones that are still there, but have shifted to different roles) tell me that they are so glad they do not work for the CEO anymore. One said to me that now that they are on the outside looking in, they see that working for the CEO led them to be a distrusting leader of their staff. They said to me that they used to be so frustrated with the staff for not maintaining quality work, but now that they are on the outside of the management chain looking in they can see that it wasn't the team members' fault at all, but instead the fear created from the top-down. --- I was in a couple meetings where the CEO essentially assigned blame to all of the VPs and Directors for the bad Glassdoor reviews, instead of properly using the time to ask what he could do to help improve morale. There were a few times where members of Leadership (not the CEO) were trying to figure out who wrote a bad Glassdoor review, or who submitted negative feedback on an internal survey -- as a way to sort of rationalize the poor feedback as irrelevant instead of trying to see how they could use the feedback to improve the culture. It seemed clear to me that they approached things this way because of the Leadership culture being created from the top. --- Often I had Leaders tell me that the CEO just got done being very angry at them about something; even though what he was angry about would go against something he had said weeks (or even days) earlier. For instance, the CEO saying he doesn't care about dates or timelines for projects, and then Leaders acting very fearful about having to tell the CEO about a missed date, even if it was a minimal delay. This clearly seemed to be because the CEO was getting angry at these Leaders when a date was missed. This often led to my team pushing out work to customers that hadn't been fully tested, which would result in bugs being found by customers, and which would then make my team look bad (internally and externally). --- I would often be told by my leaders to always be positive with my team, and never show any negativity about decisions being made at the top, even though I would be in meetings with leaders where they were doing the exact same thing -- including when my leader told me he was updating his resume to get employment somewhere else, or (as mentioned above) leaders telling me that they were pissed off because the CEO just got done being very angry at them over something ridiculous. --- Other examples of what it is like working at Golden Frog: I can’t begin to describe how many times I heard someone in Leadership explaining the proper way to speak to the CEO. If there is this much conversation going on about how to speak to the CEO, here is your sign that he is in fact the one that needs coaching, not the people around him. One of the top leaders (in the management chain above me) would sometimes say in meetings that "everyone is replaceable", which is an awful thing to say in front of staff. Leaders speaking ill (or spreading misinformation) about team members or teams in other departments, without working with Team Leads to address issues. This would lead to teams or team members having invalid reputations with Leadership. I constantly had to do what I could to turn these perceptions around, but often Leaders were too stubborn to allow their perceptions to be changed. Incredibly talented, veteran employees being let go for irrational, invalid reasons -- I wish I could get into details on this, but I need to keep with Glassdoor policies. Company not paying an exiting employee their PTO for irrational, invalid reasons -- I wish I could get into details on this, but I need to keep with Glassdoor policies. Tech Debt is a bad word here. Multiple Leaders would say that we should change the term "tech debt" to something else because the CEO does not respond well to that term. In general, do not expect to get time to work on Tech Debt. The company is incredibly stingy when it comes to compensation, benefits, etc. Often team members not even getting a cost of living adjustment. The CEO has such little trust of the staff that he has to approve every purchase, no matter how small they are. I could keep going for hours. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, even if we’re only talking about the last year. --- So, needless to say, the comments made in the other negative Glassdoor reviews are (for the most part) incredibly accurate. I would recommend that everyone stay away from this place, unless you want to put yourself through truly one of the most difficult work experiences out there.