n.b. In keeping with Glassdoor's Community Guidelines, I will not use proper names or specific titles to identify individuals
I worked for Glassdoor for just over three years. During my first two years, even with all the upheaval the pandemic brought, I enjoyed working for the company. My first two years at Glassdoor lived up to the company's mission of helping people find a job they love at a place they love.
I left the company for three reasons:
• IT Upper management, specifically director and above
• Uncertainty about Glassdoor remaining an independent entity
• Workload
The last issue, workload, was one that was an issue almost my entire time at Glassdoor. Yes, it was tasking to be expected to keep up a demanding pace of project after project with no time set aside for foundation building or even just to catch your breath. Yes, I believed during my entire time with the company that IT was never fully staffed, especially for the numerous things we were expected to accomplish. But these are not uncommon in IT, and I largely made a peace with it over time. If workload was the only fault of working for Glassdoor I would not have left. This was a contributing factor though, and one that became more grating over time because of the next two reasons.
Glassdoor and Indeed are sister companies, both of which are owned by Recruit Holdings. Since the summer of 2020, whole functions and the staff who do them have been moved over to Indeed from Glassdoor by Recruit. When broaching the subject with management, we were told, “No, Glassdoor is not merging with Indeed” but it is hard not to look at the consolidation and not think it could happen to you someday; it was a looming threat. As this consolidation only began happening after Glassdoor cut a third of it's workforce in Spring of 2020, it was hard to be at ease with the state of the company.
The primary reason I left Glassdoor was I no longer could work for IT upper management. I worked under the current upper management team for five to 12 months, depending on when each individual started with Glassdoor. After working for their department for this period of time, I concluded that I could not continue to work for an IT organization they were responsible for managing. They are the bosses and get to make the decisions, but I could opt to leave and I did.
During my first two years with Glassdoor, I worked under a different management team comprised of an IT Director (who was “detailed” to Indeed for a special project and had not yet returned to Glassdoor by time I had left) and CIO (who was moved over to Indeed in 2021 and never came back, even though they spent a year pretending like he was still involved with Glassdoor) who often, I felt, managed by various forms of chaos. Yes, it could be frustrating at times, but it was workable. With these two individuals, I felt they would at least listen to my or my team's arguments and we could come to an agreement eventually. The team, IT Engineering, would eventually be allowed to do the work in the way we felt best as long as we accomplished the same end goal.
With the newer IT upper management, there was seemingly no trust in the staff. Current IT upper management would repeatedly second guess efforts — not just on the larger roadmap things you would expect management to be involved with — but down to specific operational details like date and times announcements would go out or shifting around launch dates at the last minute. Communication within the department was fractured by their actions. They simultaneously balked at participating in regular IT day-to-day discussions and practices and attempted to control and maintain discipline over any communication happening within and coming out of IT. This could be taken as just a difference in personalities, but I felt it did a lot of damage to the feeling of “unit cohesion” IT staff and IT management had previously had.
Current IT upper management compounded matters with their constant refrain of “we can outsource that”. AV, networking, systems administration — there was not a function of IT that they seemingly felt they could not ship out. Rather than hiring into the company, building on and fostering the team, they wanted to take functionality away. Of the few projects we tried outsourcing with, the IT Engineering team likely ended up spending more time on administration and cleanup than if we had just performed the work ourselves. Hiring specialists has it's place and can be useful, but this was something different. It also contributed to the belief they did not have trust in the staff.
More so than the communication breakdown or the impression the team was being undermined by lack of support, I was most shocked by how they treated my team's manager. Brought in to be the Senior IT Manager, overseeing both IT Support (aka Help Desk) and IT Engineering, she started just a few weeks before current IT upper management but fit in so well it was like she had been there for years.
Our manager exhibited Glassdoor's values of grit, transparency and just being a good person. She listened to her team and really considered our feedback. When needed, she told us to stop arguing and just get things done as asked. As a team, we never felt like she was telling us one thing and then turning around and telling someone else in the company something else. The Senior IT Manager was a real mensch.
For whatever their reasons, current IT upper management actively worked to make life within Glassdoor uncomfortable for the Senior IT Manager. Everyone on the team detected the palpable dislike they had for the Senior IT Manager. It would show up in interactions during in-person meetings or offhand comments in email or Zoom calls. I personally had never seen upper level executives treat someone below them in the organization in such a petty manner. I felt it was unfair to the Senior IT Manager. I also could not escape the feeling that if they could do it to her, someone in management, what would stop them from doing it to the rest of us further down the line? If you spoke up or questioned them, why couldn't you be the next target? The IT Engineering team brought up all these matters and others with HR as part of our 360 review of current IT upper management in February. There was no meaningful response from the company or current IT upper management.
I never felt unappreciated for the work I did at Glassdoor. I was well compensated and received bonuses, and I even received a SMASHIE, Glassdoor's equivalent of “one of the employees of the year” award, in 2021. The team I worked with was nothing but the best. I opted to leave because I did not want to work for this upper management team at a company with such an unset future.
