Pros
A lot of great people (regrettably) work at Bold. Some minor perks like “flexible” hours, used to have free lunches. Mostly laid back culture, depending what side of the company you are on.
Cons
I don’t know where to begin with how uniquely disappointing and awful Bold is, so this itemized list is in no particular order. - CEO + other executives are completely out of touch with the vast majority of the company, but constantly “demand results” - Neary all of Bold’s business was beholden to Shopify. When Shopify slapped Bold on the wrist a few years ago for trying to host their own checkout, the entire culture at the company shifted. It was the first time that everybody in the company collectively realized how we had placed all of our eggs in one or two baskets. - Bold does very little to no actual testing of their products, opting to cram whatever changes/releases they make down their customers’ throats. This leaves the poor support staff to have to repeatedly attempt to work with broken apps, or apps with limited functionality despite promising the world to the end user. This can be seen in any of Bold’s newer apps, such as Bold Subscriptions (BS2 internally) that was a complete and utter failure to launch due to lack of QA, inadequate product management, and extremely poor decision making made in an effort to be “first to market” - There is an internal recognition program called the “Boldie awards” which simply boil down to popularity contests and peer voting. The company will tell you that it’s a great honour to receive one, because they hire sooo many people and the company is just so huge now. If you still work at Bold, ask them how many former Boldie winners are still left at the company. - Toxicity is rampant at Bold. - The majority of the HR team are complete snakes. They will use every little thing against you in an effort to protect the company instead of helping you. The level of manipulation and lack of caring about their own employees is absolutely staggering. - The CHRO joked on slack about firing people. Doesn’t think it’s a big deal, because it’s “obviously a joke in bad taste” or whatever. Water under the bridge, I guess? - The CEO drove several Bold-adjacent projects into the ground basically because he didn’t understand them. He took an opportunity to laugh about these “failed projects”in front of the company during a quarterly sales meeting. - Bold constantly pushes their employees to use their social media to promote the #BoldLife or #LifeAtBold, mainly because their reputation is in the toilet among the local tech community. Amusingly there is almost no buy-in from their support department at all, because nearly everybody in that department is either scrambling for promotions out of their current role or looking for a new job at another company. - The CEO adopted something called the OKR system which is basically just a really bad SMART Goal system. The entire company was expected to use this system, but nobody really knows what it is, or actually cares about it. - The executive (CMO?) that is in charge of the support department has literally no clue of what they are doing on a day to day basis. Doesn’t even know their employees’ names. Employees are just numbers to this executive. This exec also has absolutely no time to listen to you talk and will make it known that you’re wasting their time in almost any interaction you have with them. - Bold middle management is constantly expected to look for things to nitpick and point out in order to give people negative feedback instead of celebrating successes. - Several people at Bold who are “people leaders” have basically no people skills. It’s concerning when department managers cannot even maintain small talk with employees who have worked for them over several years. - Bold HR has forced many employees to work while they have COVID, instead of giving them time to relax and recover, because they didn’t seem “too sick,” as though they are doctors and can judge who is/isn’t fit to work. This is despite the fact that the HR team announced a no-questions-asked 2wk paid sick time “COVID leave” at the beginning of the pandemic. Seems you can only get that if you are basically dying, now. - Salaries are intended to be confidential but nobody is actually keeping them confidential. Everybody talks about their salaries and they all know that they’re being grossly underpaid. New hires often make way more money than existing hires and Bold management will act as if they have broken their back bending over backwards to give you a 3% raise. - Management does not value the opinion of their appointed team leads. This leads to wasted hours of arguments and ridiculous infighting over things like reviews, performance management, etc. It gets especially bad around review time, when team leads have to have blow-out fights with their bosses just to get someone an extra 1-2% raise, because the some managers have one or two minor examples of a time they were mildly annoyed with someone. This happens company-wide, regrettably. - Bold will talk about how much they value people who are top performers or otherwise doing amazing work, but they keep dead weight around to drag everybody down around them. Product managers, executives, support employees… doesn’t matter. If you get hired at Bold, you basically have to fire yourself. If you look as though you are working, congratulations: you’re making as much or more money than the person holding your entire team up. - Hilariously Bold fired nearly 20 people right at the beginning of the pandemic who had “longstanding issues” but this totally had nothing to do with saving money. At all. Promise. - Most of the experienced people have left Bold over the last 5 years. The blind are leading the blind. Nobody sticks around to develop experience because Bold is merely a stepping stone to a better income elsewhere, if you have the patience for it. To say that the company has hemorrhaged experienced employees over the last 2-3 years would be a gross understatement. It is a revolving door and the leadership doesn’t seem to care. - You are basically expected to be “on call” if you make it to Tier 2. You aren’t really compensated for it though. Oops. If you foolishly opted into this as a favour or because you felt it was the right thing to do for a bit, too bad. You’re stuck on call. I could go on and on and on about how absurd things at Bold have become, but this + other negative reviews should give you a good idea. This isn’t even covering the some of the physical and verbal sexual harassment, bullying, nepotism, or other nonsense I’ve seen happen at Bold. Stay as far away from Bold as you possibly can. If you currently work at Bold, please for the love of god get out. It will be the best thing you’ve done in a long time. Believe me. Unemployment may actually be better than working at Bold.
