Lord of the Flies is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding about a group of boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves, far from modern civilization, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.
In this case, that island is DZone, And on that island you will feel like the smart, rational, bullied Piggy...every day. That pretty much sums it up in a nutshell.
But WHAT is DZone??? (I heard this from virtually everyone.) It's a social media site catering to a niche of software developers/architects. Other than that relatively small group nobody knows who they are. They don't advertise. They also have a Q&A platform called AnswerHub, a down-scale copy of Quora.
I only wish there had been a review of this murky place on Glassdoor. Good grief. Where to begin...
DZone is a virtual Romper Room with no adults in sight. Expect to dodge felt "Nerf" bullets all day, thrown bean bags, pillow fights in conference rooms and offices, as well as insults and jokes that, let's just say would not be tolerated by women or certain ethnic groups, not to mention the Department of Labor, EEOC, ACLU, etc.
You will be thrown to the wolves with absolutely no training on products or processes. In fact, you will probably not be doing what you were actually hired to do. Your job for the day, as well as your desk/seating arrangement/office changes on the whims of the owner.
There will be headache-inducing loud music, constantly, even while trying to conduct business. And if you don't like it or complain, "TOUGH $%^&!" If the advertisers that keep the business afloat don't like the mistakes/snafus/poor performance of campaign, they will get the same answer (out of earshot).
The owner will be in either a decent, human mood, or he will bark at you mercilessly. You won't know, it changes hourly. You will know it's a bark coming by the sound of his Tevas shuffling towards your work space to rip into you for God-only-knows-what, or by him summoning you to his palatial office, where he sits on his couch all day, snacking and surfing the web on his laptop. His lackey, yes-man co-owner will probably never summon you, as he pretty much has no opinion of his own. If the boss said apples were actually oranges, lackey would agree.
There are four "kings" at DZone, the rest are peons and expendable. If you make the mistake of working here, you'll figure it out quickly. Expect the big, loud, impossibly puerile guy (one of the sycophantic "kings") to make your life equally miserable, no matter what position you have in the company. He loves to be loud and argue. The last "little king," is actually a good guy at heart, and you will probably like him, but he knows where his bread is buttered and you can only expect his backing but so much. He won't be around very often; the owner will have him out of the office for several hours at a time, several days a week, shopping for snacks, games, toy guns, TVs, or anything else that will make the place look cooler on the surface. All the better to hide the rotten core.
The "kings" are under the impression that games, beer, brats, and snacks more than make up for the COMPLETE LACK OF, oh, I dunno, important things like respect, decent pay, praise for a job well-done, health insurance, stability, job growth...
DZone is a classic example of "churn and burn." Turnover is astoundingly high, in all departments, but especially in sales/marketing. You will bump into the ghosts of employees past everywhere. If the place was a murder scene, there would be the chalk outlined bodies of a dozen or more sales reps. That might not sound like a lot, but for a company that's only been around a few years and has but a few sales reps at a time, it's a high number. Most didn't last more than a few months before they were cut, stormed out, or quit...by email. It doesn't matter how much advertising is actually sold, or the prestige of the client landed; if one or all of the "kings" don't like you anymore, for whatever reason, expect to be a casualty.
Lastly, for a "technology services company," there are many, many, problems with DZone's equipment, from the echoing VoIP phones, to the aging computers. They may give you an old laptop (brand new models are for "kings" only), but even that will have problems. Oh, and you're expected to be on that computer even when you leave the office, as the owner takes notice if you're not logged on. Like password memorization? Good, you'll need to memorize about twenty, with more coming each day. Need to work in Microsoft Word or Excel? Maybe the only guy using it in the next office can log out so you can log in.
I could go on, but I think (and hope) you get the picture. Consider yourself warned.
