TouchTunes Reviews

2.9

43% would recommend to a friend

(129 total reviews)
avatar

Ross Honey

32% approve of CEO

27% positive business outlook

TouchTunes has an employee rating of 2.9 out of 5 stars, based on 129 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The TouchTunes employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Media and communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

129 reviews
1.0
1 Aug 2017

Worst company I ever worked for

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There's smart, talented people that work here. It's a shame their potential goes untapped. Lax dress code and working hours. People stroll in whenever and can leave whenever as long work gets done. Benefits are standard & decent. Only thing missing is 401k match, which is promised to be added by 2018.

Cons

Where do I begin... For starters, a note to all those considering a job here. There are a few fake positive Glassdoor reviews for this company in response to the negative ones and in a weak attempt to balance out the negative reviews (presumably from HR). Do not buy into it and really vet the position/company for yourself. Also, if you read some of the recent fake positive reviews, you get a taste of the "class" by the characters in this company. This company has all the traits that could easily fall under a Forbes headline "Signs it's a Bad Place to Work." There is high turnover, low morale, and condescending managers/leadership. The primary water cooler topics are about job hunting progress or venting sessions on how disrespectful leaders or managers behave. All important decisions are typically made at the Executive level and shoved down people's throats to execute, which leaves little room for any creativity or innovative thought. You will feel like an anxiety-driven monkey that's not empowered to think, but to just take the directives and make it work without any concept of how this impacts the work on people's plates already. This is a place where you will constantly feel like you're surviving, not thriving. It's disappointing and soul crushing how there is a huge lack of accountability in this company. People are fearful to speak up because they don't want to create drama, doubt themselves/situation they're placed in from overthinking it, and/or don't know how to deal with some of the situations that arise because it's outlandish that they're placed in that situation in the first place. It's amazing who the company chooses to promote into positions of authority and is another indirect sign that they don't care about the culture or care for their employees. The #1 reason why people leave companies is due to bad managers and this company is doing a phenomenal job of that. It often feels like Execs turn a blind eye to how certain managers behave and don't take the time to really dig deeper into the obvious low morale of some teams or are not acting fast enough. They can do better and it's their responsibility as a leader to address the obvious bad behavior of certain managers. Unprofessional conduct on a whole lot of levels.

avatar
TouchTunes Response
8y
I only recently started responding to reviews on glassdoor.com, but when I saw this review when it was published back in August of last year, I posted the following on an internal messaging board (Yammer) to all employees: Hey all, as I have posted before, the senior team and I check out our employee reviews on Glassdoor.com to get another data source on how things are going for you all. In reading through them recently, one review caught my attention. It was written in the first week of August by a current employee, and it was titled “Worst company I have ever worked for.” As the title suggests, our co-worker has very strong opinions on how TouchTunes falls short as a place to work. The list is long and includes condescending managers/leadership, complete lack of accountability and fearful employees. In all honesty, reading it bummed me out. It did so on two levels. First, I have a colleague who is very frustrated and unhappy working here, which sucks. We spend so much time at work I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Second, the workplace described in the review does not match the company and employees that I have come to know and respect for the last 20 months. Are we perfect? No way. However, I am not seeing what this person is seeing, and that makes me worried that I am missing something. So the rest of this post is for whoever wrote that review: Let’s talk, I want to help. I want to understand better what is causing you so much frustration and what problems you see that I am not. You have an open offer to sit down with me and talk this through any time you want. If you are not comfortable doing that and prefer to remain anonymous, no problem – create a random Gmail account, email me and we will try to make progress that way. Hope to hear from you and hang in there.
3.0
2 May 2018

Half and half

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Cutting edge tech stack. - Solid core product. - They experiment with bleeding edge tech: AI tools, big data and others. - Amazing people. Friendly, funny and smart. - Their IT group might eventually become a world-class team in my opinion - Good health insurance. It offers 100% coverage in most cases. - Fantastic work/life balance. - They like to build everything themselves. The exercise is fun and enriching, that’s why I’m listing it as something positive but sometimes it feels like they are reinventing the wheel. - Solid business and development processes that keep evolving. - I witnessed how upper management evolved from not having any idea on what they wanted to laying out a plan that they now present to the entire company during the first trimester as yearly objectives. It took a while but they have learned the value of communicating rather than being absolutely absent and obscure. - Awesome coffee machine. - Demo Fridays with beer & snacks.

Cons

- Some of their core products are built on top of outdated and painful-to-learn technologies like Google Web Toolkit. - I worked for TouchTunes for several years and I know it very well so I can responsibly say this: it is monstrously cheap. - Training is kept to the minimum per employee even though they brag a lot about “investing in ourselves”. - Even the RSP contribution “match” is abysmally miserable. - They never, not ever, give 100% of the promised bonus to the employees. The bonus is supposed to be tied to the employee’s yearly performance review but it isn’t in reality. They just keep making excuses in order to not pay what they should. - Once I got a yearly bonus of $500 (yes, 500) and I had a 4/5 in my performance review that year. - Like most IT companies in town, TouchTunes falls into the pitfall of giving new hires a competitive salary while forgetting about the more senior employees. By doing this they don’t realize (or maybe they do and they don’t do anything about it) that doing so is disrespectful and unfair to the people that have built the tools that sustain the current revenue. So don’t expect to build a long-lasting career there. You will probably have to leave after 2-3 years unless you are ready to accept being grotesquely underpaid. - One more thing about the prior, management has absolutely no problem lying about your current salary. They will, in private, repeat one time after another that what they’re paying you is competitive with the market. - Because the core product is solid things don’t move very fast. Everyone kind of chills a lot and nothing gets done in time. But eventually some work gets done. - Managers don’t really follow up on development plans. They’ll just lay some plan out to get rid of you and they’ll forget about it. - I disagree with the other review regarding promotions. At least when it comes to the tech group, they don’t promote even if it makes perfect sense. They’ll rather hire new people with a lot of experience instead of giving others the chance to step up. - Worst performance review process I’ve seen in my almost two decades old career: - The format of the review keeps changing year after year. - It isn’t based on personal achievements/goals. - Easily biased in many different ways since it is all based about opinions instead of results. - Will easily contain negative observations which you will hear about for the first time in your life when the review is handed over to you. - No free parking. Hard to park around the office. - No chicks. - If you are going to work in the Montreal office and you only speak English do yourself a favour: avoid the office manager at all costs. - As the result of a merger there are two CEOs. Doesn’t make any sense. There’s one of them that’s just some sort of accountant.

avatar
TouchTunes Response
8y
Thanks for your feedback. While you had some concerns about your time with TouchTunes, I appreciate you laying out a lot of great positives, like our experimenting with bleeding edge tech and your appreciation for the all hands in February laying out the plan for the year. With regards to the areas that you believe we could improve, I am going to focus on compensation, both base salary, and bonus, as that is super important. First, let’s talk about the base salary. Like many companies, we use market surveys to determine the appropriate base compensation. Our goal is to be competitive, and we have made a lot of adjustments in the last 24 months to achieve that. In our March 2018 anonymous employee survey, only 12.5% of employees in our Montreal office felt that they weren’t compensated fairly vs. the market and industry. Overall, I feel good about that, although there is still work to do and that is why I encourage all employees who have a concern about their compensation to approach their manager to discuss it. On bonus payouts, our plan is based on the company hitting its EBITDA goals and employee performance. For FY2017, which ended in December 2017, the company met its targets, and the bonus pool was funded 100%. Every employee that met or exceeded their objectives for the year, of which there was a large number, received 100% or more of their target bonus. I also want to bring up a topic that you didn’t mention explicitly, but is very important to us: Diversity. We know a diverse team is a stronger team and we want people from different countries, cultures, genders and ethnicities to feel welcome at TouchTunes. If I am may offer you some feedback, while you may not have intended it, some of the language you used in your review fell short of that bar. To wrap it up, I am very proud of our Montreal team, both in the great work they do and the work environment they have. In that recent employee poll I mentioned, 92% of our Montreal team would recommend working at TouchTunes to friends and family, which is awesome!
3.0
16 Aug 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Very good benefits and insurance package. Free breakfast and lunch at the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Clear career milestones to reach to get promoted to the next level.

Cons

Management and architecture is archaic. Developers are responsible for creating their own backlog with little to no help from analysts and architects. No one seems to take responsibility for features, which leads to devs having to take initiative, which leads to ideas being blocked by the indecisiveness of architects. Played a switcheroo by hiring me as fully remote but then enforcing hybrid 6 months in.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 129 Reviews

Glassdoor has 135 TouchTunes reviews submitted anonymously by TouchTunes employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if TouchTunes is right for you.