Fair and Balanced Review - Customer Success Manager Exostar Employee Review

First thing you must realize is that Exostar isn't a real company. The company is a joint venture of 5 industry-leading A&D companies, which seems impressive until you realize the relationship between parent(s) and child is akin to that of the wealthy socialite who sends their challenged child to boarding school because they cannot be troubled to deal with them. As far as working at Exostar goes, I will discuss 3 levels of the company I can comment on from direct experience, similar to Dante's various circles if you are familiar with that tale. The first circle is the company in general. If you are working outside of the Operations department, things might be OK for you. You should enjoy working with technology that is in most cases 5-7 years out of date, and with severely limited resources, but if you do enjoy that sort of challenge it could be a good landing spot. There is also a pervasive culture company-wide towards setting exceedingly low standards for accomplishment on individual projects, and a general resignation to failure even when held to such a low bar of achievement. I worked within the Operations department, which is the second circle of the company I am able to review from direct experience. This is a new department within Exostar (point of emphasis: a 15-year-old company didn't think to have an Operations department for essentially 14 years.) The leadership of Operations will regale you with stories of what hard workers they are, how everyone always tells them so, and how they could never expect anyone to live up to their lofty standards. As a whole, Operations seem to function at a level passable for a small software company, which given the lack of direction and available resources is no small accomplishment. Finally, there is the Customer Success department, of which I was a member. This final circle is to be avoided at all costs. The failure of leadership within this department is so abhorrent that even the Captain of the Titanic would blush. The leadership of the Customer Success department have no professional experience in Customer Success, and this is apparent at every interaction. They will tell you that they are still in an immature state as an organization, but that they are building something majestic. This is analogous to a friend asking you to come to their house to see the amazing scale replica of the Parthenon they have been working on for months, and upon arrival seeing a mashed pile of multi-colored Play-Doh smeared on the kitchen table. Beyond the general ineptness of the Customer Success leadership, there is also their toxic, garish personal management style. Molded in the Biff Tannen School of Management, they cover for their own shortcomings by belittling their colleagues, bullying their direct reports, and then strutting around the office like a pigeon who had just knowingly made a mess of your favorite hat while you walked through the park. As it relates to their stated expectations of their team, they ensure they give them just enough information to send them down an errant path, giving them a chance to demonstrate their superiority to you by publicly chastising you in front of your coworkers for daring to follow their given directions. In conclusion, if you're a down on your luck software engineer or marketing associate, but are very well versed on processes and professional standards from 2005, this could be a good fit for you. If you work in Operations, are about to be evicted from your home, and the only car you have to live in is a sub-compact or smaller, I suppose receiving a paycheck from Exostar could be a reasonable alternative. However, if you are a Customer Success professional, living in a rusted out 1976 Ford Pinto and panhandling for spare change in the Exostar parking lot would be a far more fulfilling career option.