Great place for looking at the internet - Anonymous employee Healthgrades Employee Review

I've always enjoyed looking at the internet, and I found Healthgrades to be a really good place to do that. There was occasionally some work to do, but it was less of an obstacle than you would imagine. Probably a third of the projects I worked on just got delayed for so long that they eventually disappeared — either the person in charge left or got laid off, or more often, there was no single person in charge, which meant no one was actually accountable for the job getting finished. Even when someone was in charge of a project, you still didn't want to invest too much time or energy in it, because there was always a better-than-even chance that it would get drastically reworked at the eleventh hour. The folks at the head office in Denver are just bubbling with ideas! When you have that many ideas, you don't have time to sit around and see how one performs — once it's out in the market, you must immediately replace it with a new idea. Credit where it's due: The powers that be at Healthgrades were never afraid to blow everything up and start over. Like, never afraid. Like, you'd think, "Maybe these people *should* be a little afraid, because, gosh, wow, we've blown everything up so many times and we have virtually nothing to show for it, and yet sometimes they wonder aloud on conference calls why we have trouble getting traction in the industry." But they were just so undaunted. It was kind of inspiring — like, whoa, maybe a bunch of Irish setters *could* run a nationally known company if you just promoted all of them to VP and kept giving them venture capital. (If you desperately want to be a VP, that would be another decent reason to try working at Healthgrades. Literally 80 percent of the company is VPs. The guy who repaired the coffee machine was promoted to "VP, Coffee Access Solutions" one day, just because he was in the right place at the right time.) And speaking of conference calls: There were a lot of them. Didn't matter if you were working on a quick, routine job virtually identical to something you'd done the previous month, or discussing the launch of a major product that could make or break the entire company — either way, you were gonna kick things off with a call that ran over by anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes. Again, the good thing about this was that it gave you a lot of time to look at the internet. You rarely had to listen too hard, because about half the time, the person in charge of the project didn't have any real information about it yet (but had gone ahead with the meeting because it was the only space everyone had open on their calendars); the other half of the time, the person in charge wouldn't actually be on the call, or could only be on the call for about 10 minutes, because they had another meeting. Point is, you knew you were going to have to ask for direction via email later regardless — which was fine, because by that time the direction would probably have changed already anyway. The only time we didn't have a conference call, or even a project input form, or anything, was when we revamped the entire Healthgrades B2B website. So that was bold! In fairness to the folks leading that effort, it didn't turn out any better or worse than the jobs we bothered to plan for. I guess in a sense, working at Healthgrades was a very Buddhist experience. There was very little reason to remember what you'd done before or to consider what might happen in the future; everything was in constant flux. Your best bet was just to focus on the present moment. Anyhoo, if you need to make a positive difference in the world with your work, there are a lot of places where you can do that. If you just need to spin your wheels for a while and look at the internet, and you want OK compensation and benefits, I would say maybe give Healthgrades a try. The company did manage to attract a bunch of smart, talented, thoughtful people during my time there, which was a sincere pleasure. And although almost all of those people are gone now, who knows, it could happen again!