Shutterstock Reviews

Very top heavy with ineffective leaders. Everything is personal and political, no one is motivated to do a good job for the sake of it. People stall each other at every turn if it will benefit whatever cause or empire they are trying to build. Over 15 years of professional experience and Custom had some of the poorest management I have ever seen. Bad behavior, harassment, and dubious deals are constantly rewarded if it adds to the bottom line.

1. Upper management doesn't care about it's people or its business. It ONLY cares about its short-term stock price movements. This is why we have to endure hiring freezes and a massive lack of resources every quarter despite having zero debt and $250M in cash. 2. Org structure: The company changes its org structure every couple of years. Just before I started they had a GM structure in place, then moved away from it when I started, then switched back to it last year and now they are considering moving away from it again. The worst part, you can work in an office where no one in the office shares the same boss within the same department! They all report into management in NYC. As a result, you don't feel like you're part of one big team. 2. Turnover at C-level: If you don't believe me, feel free to look it up. I've worked for the company for 2 years. Everyone in the C-suite except the CEO and the COO have been replaced at least once, if not twice during that time. Each time, a new C-level person comes in, including the CTOs we've had, they change everything which puts the company in constant state of migration (especially when it comes to tech). More on this below. 3. Turnover for general employees: For the reasons mentioned above, turnover in the organization is very high. This leads to huge problems, especially for developers because there is no one around who can explain how things are built. In 2017, they replaced all but 1 tech VP. 4. Migrations: The company is in a constant state of tech migrations instead of actually creating something of value for its customers. They sign big SaaS deals with third party providers and then realize they don't want or need the service anymore. This is partially due to the high turnover. Essentially, the people who sign the deals don't stick around long enough to see the services being adopted within the company. When new people come in, they suggest we change services and the cycle starts all over again. All 400 developers are working on migrations as we speak. Example: Front end platform: The company took 2 years to build a new platform for all of Shutterstock.com. It was completed in 2016. In January of 2017, a new CTO joins the company. He doesn't like the new platform, so he decides to scrap it and built another one. Well, 1.5 years later about 50 developers are still building it. Example 2 Backend services: For roughly 5 years the company has been trying to migrate out of an old tech stack that literally no one knows how it's built. This migration continues and has blocked us from being able to innovate. More examples: The company has switched large scale CMSs at least 3 times in the last 2 years. Each one takes about 6 months to integrate. In addition, the company has been migrating toward using Salesforce for roughly 4 years now with no end in sight (literally). Also, most of the companies web properties are in the process of being moved to AWS. I can continue but I think you get the picture. Bottom line: Trust the reviews on the Glassdoor. They are poor for a reason.