Photobox Reviews

Rather than nebulous grievances, I’d like to provide you with solid examples of the way Photobox operates. Let me underline that these are the norm, rather than exceptional incidents. - The gender pay gap is staggering. At one point, I had a female colleague (let’s call her A) as well as a male colleague (B) doing the exact same job, A for four countries and B for one country. While B’s work was consistently sub-par and created additional problems for another team (including breaking the website a few times), he was paid 250% of A's salary while doing 1/4 of her job (badly). Upon finding out, A, an absolute rockstar employee, asked for a modest raise that wouldn’t bring her anywhere near B’s salary, and was promised it by her manager come performance review time. Soon after, a company restructure happened and her manager was moved to a different division and the raise never happened. To the best of my knowledge, the manager was aware of the upcoming restructure and knew they wouldn’t have to make good on their promise. Needless to say, A got a decent salary elsewhere and B continued to cause problems at Photobox. - Proactivity is futile. A coworker hired to be an expert on X went above and beyond his duties and put together a detailed proposal on how to improve X, and submitted it to the management. The management the proceeded to ignore his proposal and pay an external consulting firm £150,000 (one hundred and fifty thousand pounds) to investigate ways to improve X. The consultant’s proposal was identical to my coworker’s, except perhaps less detailed. - There is zero respect for non-management level employees. When their manager left, one team was left without management for 5 months, buzzing around aimlessly with no support or even basic information given to them, finding out about huge changes to their work in presentations given to the entire company, and constantly being berated for not adhering to new rules nobody bothered to inform them about. Work they were hired to do was diverted from them to external agencies (see a common thread appear here?) under the pretense of them being “too busy”, when in actuality they had precious little to do, except maybe job search. In some other teams, lower level employees are also routinely talked down to or patronised by their superiors. - There is zero respect for lower management levels as well. One manager was on medical leave for two months following a serious injury (sustained in a non work-related accident, I should clarify) and came back to work to find out her report was promoted to her position, and she found herself with no job to do, no explanations until she demanded them. I have no doubt in my mind that her gender played a big role in the treatment she received. - Having superficially studied analytic geometry, I can only call the levels of micro-management at Photobox “asymptotic”, in that they tend to infinity. Higher management, and I mean managing directors or C-level people, regularly jump in on low-level tasks to provide feedback concerning things such as copywriting or the use of colours. People hired to be experts on the subject, usually with university education on the matter, are routinely ignored to favour the gut feeling of high-level employees with no formal education in those areas. The feedback provided can range from “Yuck” through “more zazzy” all the way to “need more santa depth” (all direct quotes. “Yuck” was a complete sentence with no other information added.) - Conversely, actual management borders on zero. Shoddy work is never called out in any meaningful way, and nobody is encouraged to improve on, or even care about their work, all the way down to a level as basic as correct spelling. In fact, if you’re comfortable blaming other people for your own mistakes, spelling or otherwise, you’ll be guaranteed to do well here, because skills in office politics will get you much further than actual skill in your job. Problem employees are never acknowledged as such, and their eventual promotion is your only hope of not having to deal with them anymore. - Communication is non-existent. Multiple people and/or teams work on the same project, doubling or tripling the work, without discovering that someone else was doing it as well until late stages of the project. Sometimes teams work on the same project but somehow manage to work against each other. Last-minute information (“last minute” in the sense that nobody bothered to think about it before a project was started, or simply didn’t bother to communicate it) regularly disrupts workflow to the point where the words “signed off” are literally meaningless. Briefing documents I can only describe as utter shambles, with a few notable exceptions. I should add though that the exceptions are in no way noted by management, so there is no tangible incentive to making them non-shambolic: only common human decency. - Employee retention is woefully low. Still, new hires happen rarely, and only when desperation reaches a certain level. Rather than rehiring, people’s jobs are regularly foisted on to their coworkers who are then offered either laughable raises (if male) or no raises whatsoever (if female). These are usually presented as a fait accompli, making negotiations difficult. This also exacerbates the lopsidedness of the company’s structure, innumerable layers of management managing fewer and fewer employees. - The “performance-dependent” bonus is actually dependent of the performance of the entire company, rather than individuals, so it actually doesn’t matter how hard you work. Sales targets are conveniently set at an absurdly high level (“let’s quintuple our year on year sales figures all the while using the exact same sales strategy we’ve been using for the last three years!”) and the figure you end up receiving is invariably hugely affected by factors outside of your control (said factors being usually the subpar employees who aren’t being managed).

Ah the cons, the many many cons. If a company needs to post fake reviews on here to up their score then you know there is a problem. Just take a look at the laughable featured review for a good example of how not to do it. Chosen few There are a few people that managed to be in the right place at the right time to get solid promotions and many of them were well deserved. That is only really true for 5 or so out of the hundreds that work there. Terrible opportunities There are basically no opportunities to progress. "Consultants" are brought in all over the place and external people are hired in above proven hands. Strip and sell Since the new investment company came in and the old CEO, Stan left there has been an obvious strip and sell mentality. It appears as though they are maximising profits in the short term to sell on the company. None of this is even remotely sustainable and they are riding on the work of people that left 6 months ago (that they never replaced) Depressing It's such a depressing and sapping place to spend your time. Nobody is happy for any period of time and nobody wants to be there. Ancient tech They are running on a terrible legacy platform that was built in 2008 and is just a monstrosity. This is the worst place to work if you're interested in tech because you'll spend your entire day propping up and plugging holes. Rudderless The few at the top have absolutely no idea what they're doing. It has been a long time since there was a successful month of sales and tiny little outfits are popping up all over that do a far better job for a lot less money and with better tech. Poor pay for too much work There are simply not enough people working there, when people leave they just don't replace them and expect others to pick up the workload. One I remember well was two people doing the same job for different markets, one left and the other was offered an additional £1,500 a year to do both roles at the same time. Absolutely laughable. There are plenty more but I refuse to waste any more of my time on this company.