Hootsuite Reviews

Cons

Growing company experiencing typical transition pains from small start up mentality to corporate leader

Cons

Change is constant, and there are some teething pains as we grow from startup to large org

Cons

Expected politics for size of company, expected BS from an enterprise company: sales is king, "not what it used to be" as they grow into an enterprise company, unclear future of whether Hootsuite is still the unicorn it once was, for every 2 or 3 very smart people there is 1 person who is well below average and is a pain to work with.

Cons

not many to think of. great place to work.

Cons

Incompetent mid and director management that leads to high turnover.
Still lots of brogrammer culture residue, HR doesn't do a good job at educating and promoting gender-neutral values and respect-oriented culture. Some people appear oblivious to what's actually wrong.
Awesome employees are fed up with unfair promotions and leaving or forced to leave.

Cons

- HR doesn't do a whole lot when you complain about feeling uncomfortable or disrespected by a colleague. This needs to change. When someone complains to you about feeling disrespected by a colleague, do something about it! Don't be another Uber.
- Some senior leadership can be unprofessional during retreats.
- They say there's a lot of professional growth opportunities but that only happens if you're lucky to have a manager who allows you to grow. Some managers don't foster growth.
- Starting to lose some really awesome OG people.
- U/X of the product needs a major update.

Cons

- Non-existent technical leadership. Software development directors/managers have not written code in years. You will hear many buzzwords and acronyms being thrown around by these people.

- Technical managers do not have much/any coding experience; you are dealing mostly with people that have "soft" skills - i.e. creating jira tickets, scheduling meetings. No actual mentorship of any kind takes place here. Poor developers have been promoted to managers - the louder you work, the higher your probability of landing one of these roles. Technical Managers pride themselves in staying away from the code. You will never see a manager raise a pull request in order to solve an issue. If you are looking for technical leadership, you will not find it here as there are no leaders.

- There is an over abundance of "project/agile" advocates in the company. These people have titles of 'software engineer' and 'development coach' , but they don't actually write code. They excel at scheduling meetings, editing google docs and creating jira tickets.

- Poor tech stack. Extremely hard to make simple changes due to the lack of a proper dev environment - you cannot run everything on your own machine (due to the unnecessary adoption of a microservice architecture, they have a dev "cloud" setup). You are dealing with a PHP monolith that lacks significant test coverage. JVM culture and unnecessary usage of design patterns are a common theme.

- Outdated laptops - 2011 MBP

- Developers lack fundamental CS skills; the bar is set very low. Take a look at the interview questions that are being asked.

- Co-ops and Junior Developers often outperform developers that have been at the company for years. It's common to see co-ops mentoring full-timers.

- Configuration over convention. As a developer, a significant portion of your time is spent setting up your machine depending on the project you are working on. There is an abundance of tribal knowledge. Deployments are not trivial due to flaky tests and inconsistent environments.

- Technical debt is seldom addressed. There is too much to count.

- Very poor code reviews. "Extremely" large pull requests are a common occurrence.

- Security and Ops teams are floating around creating unnecessary procedures to stay relevant in the company. Teams are more than capable of managing their own products, however they are not given the autonomy.

Cons

Brought in some big wig C-Level leadership in 2016 to try to turn the company around and has really affected the culture - especially in sales and marketing.
The company is doing no better than it was before and in fact the sales team have not hit their targets in over 8 quarters! Difficult when it constantly feels like you are failing.
The new c-levels are old school and manage in a fear or bully type style where everyone is afraid to say what they really think. Turn over is very high.

Cons

There are zero women in senior leadership positions under the head of sales. The recent May offsite to set the strategy for the remainder of the year and beyond attended by the head of sales and his 9 direct report leaders who are all male may as well have been hosted at a men's club. What century are we in?

Cons

-product cannibalism (Terrible for salespeople who are trying to sell Enterprise worthy software)
-poor management
-Terrible Culture
-Way below average compensation