Ooyala Reviews

Please note: every negative review on Glassdoor has prompted a MASSIVE company-wide witch hunt to the tune of “who is the author?!” That alone should give you a sense of the culture here. I didn’t really care to write a review, but apparently it’s such a scandalous act nowadays that I simply couldn’t resist. Let me tell you what happens when you work here. You forget what normal feels like. You think it’s ok when senior management openly gossips about who’s getting fired next month. You shrug your shoulders when bodies start dropping so frequently that nobody even bothers to tell you who works here anymore. You watch your coworkers leave in droves and the work just piles up as management smiles condescendingly and tells you “let’s just do more with less!” You begin to expect disrespect and political games. You think toxic is the new normal. You start to believe it when management tells you you’re just lucky to have a job. You work your tail off - on call at all hours of the night - only to have senior management, during a tantrum, shout “what have you even done since you got here?” You get in trouble for not looking happier - aren’t you having fun? You step out of the office during lunchtime to pick up your kids and immediately get put on blast for “obviously interviewing elsewhere.” You start to doubt your own self-worth. You may have a thick skin, but this place eats away at you. How could it not? It’s sad because I do like and respect a lot of my coworkers. I also used to respect our “executive management group.” Our GC (and former acting CEO - don’t even get me started on how messed up that was) and CFO were straight up Gs. I looked up to them. Now anyone with any credibility is gone and we’re on yet another random CEO. And don’t get me started on the remaining founder. I usually find anonymous personal critiques distasteful, but this has to be said. On one hand, he’s clever. Great. He’s also manipulative and a legitimate sociopath. Don’t be fooled by the “pleasant” demeanor. And by the way, he hasn’t done real work for years - he’s secretly a master delegator and all of the work rolls downhill to those he openly treats like his “minions.” All of his time and paranoid energy is spent maintaining an image of total control and indispensability. People think he stays here out of goodwill and loyalty, but it’s obvious that he just likes feeling like the top dog. But enough about that. One person doesn’t make or break a company. Remember, though, that the fish rots at the head. This company has somehow gone from a plucky startup to a graveyard where dreams and self-worth go to die. I truly used to believe in this company - but it’s too far gone at this point. The most recent executive posse has really upped the ante by the way - there’s a new level of fear that anyone could be fired at any time. You know it’s bad when you have to sit in your car and take deep breaths before heading into the office every morning. You know it’s bad when you fantasize about getting laid off because you don’t have the courage to leave what is essentially an abusive relationship. You know it’s bad when your aggressive and desperate job search is crippled by chronic self doubt and a nagging feeling of worthlessness that you’ve internalized without realizing it. My advice to all of you? Take a step back and realize that this isn’t normal. It is not going to change. And you are better than this. One day you’ll look back and wonder why it took you so long to leave.

- Crushing technical debt from years absent of competent supervision, especially in customer satisfaction and engineering. Lacking clear direction or priority whatsoever apart from an obsessive campaign of cost cutting, improvements or innovation to all of the company's platforms were swept out the door as talented engineers left seeking challenges more significant than polishing rapidly tarnishing brass. - The great sense of morale the company once had has largely been replaced by a low-level thread of cynicism, especially among technical staff. Successively bad decisions during and following a 14% laying off (that included the entire engineering team responsible for one of the core products), disruptive hyper-focus on cost reduction in favor of customer satisfaction, negligence in allocating resources toward maintaining critical internal infrastructure, and ever growing technical debt have sapped away most of the optimism the company once had. -There has been zero visible attempt made to stop the exodus of the company's talent, good employees are jumping ship out of frustration. This has been so persistent it's not uncommon for somebody to ask you--with absolutely no note of irony, humor, or sarcasm--if it's your last day when you walk from one end of the office to the other carrying a small box. More than once a day. - Zero technical hiring in the Silicon Valley office if there's actually any direct technical hiring happening at all anywhere within the company. All technical back-fill appears to be funneled to outsource vendors. - For individual contributors there are no career paths at Ooyala. With the seeming freeze in hiring there's no expansion to any of the teams with direct hires and thus no opportunity to shift among teams or to move up within either individual contributor or management tracks. - Ooyala has lost anything resembling a culture of any kind. People used to hang out around the office on their time off to work on projects because they enjoyed being at the company working with the people at the desk across from them.  Ooyala used to host technical meetups for open source communities and host regular hackathons. In the last nine months this has completely evaporated. There's no longer a sense of value or reward in being connected to the people you work with in any way deeper than the 9-to-5 clock. The company has completely lost it's sense of fun.