It's just a job, not a career - Anonymous employee AppFolio Employee Review

The thing about working at Appfolio is that your experience will largely be determined by where you are in your career. You will probably enjoy it if this is your first professional job after college, or perhaps if you are just looking for a job to pay the bills for a while. In either case, plan to stay no more than a year or two and keep your expectations low. I worked for AppFolio 4+ years and consider it a good starting point for a career but not a place to build your career long-term. Here are the cons: 1. External Promotion AppFolio fills a lot of management positions by hiring externally. This means less opportunity for you, the hard-working employee. Of course this is good news if you are on the outside and interviewing for such a position! 2. Promotions are Simply Title Changes While internal promotions do happen, they are usually nothing more than a changing of your title and don't offer much, if any, additional responsibility or true growth with respect to what you do on a day to day basis. It's worth sticking around until you get a "Senior" title if that's what you're after but for those wanting more than that, then it might be time to move on. Lateral movement is great to a point, but it's treated as if it's a promotion like you're supposed to be happy that you can't get promoted but you can job hop all you want. 3. Inconsistent Rules / Guidelines Compliance rules are set in place but when a customer doesn't fit in the regulations and employee sticks to the rules, management then appeases customer and doesn't always back up employees even though they were doing exactly what they were told to do. 4. Incompetency is Overlooked It is way too easy for employees, and yes managers too, to get by while barely keeping up with their job. Managers and directors seem to just not care how employees perform. If work piles up for one employee they will just dole it out to the rest, in essence giving extra work to those who are trying to stay ahead. Where's the motivation to work hard if you know your co-workers performance is lackluster and you will end up with some of their clients/work anyway? 5. Yes Men/Women are Rewarded This one has to be the worst. AppFolio's culture has a very fake air to it, and it is no where more evident than when an inept employee gets a promotion. Why would such employee get a promotion you ask? It is because they agree with everything the boss says and are also vocal about how much they love AppFolio. What upper management wants more than anything is for you to be a proud promoter of the company, it's culture, and just be smiling and positive all the time. While there's nothing wrong with that at all (in fact is a good thing because who wants to work at a company where everyone is negative?), in this case the pendulum has swung wayyy too far to the happy-go-lucky side of things. So much so, that we have these cases where management is willing to turn a blind eye to the incompetency and instead reward the positivity. Sadly, I watched this happen many times and it really does take away the motivation to do your best work. 6. Fake, Very Fake As a continuation of the last con, the culture seems very forced and not entirely genuine. It was genuine at one time and some of that has continued but for the most part you get the sense while working there that behind the smile, your manager or co-worker is really just out for himself/herself. 7. Pretend to Want Feedback Speaking up in meetings is encouraged but in reality they only want you to go along with everything the manager or director is saying, don't try to come up with alternative solutions. Basically if you reiterate what a manager just said in a different way and agree with them, you will be applauded. Employee surveys are sent out every so often which is a great way to provide feedback but for the most part things don't change in response to the surveys. It seems that the motivation for the surveys is more to influence and convince employees that AppFolio is a great place to work than collect feedback.