Vercel Reviews

I was sold the dream of Vercel. This place was such an incredible disappointment. In the field org, senior management is atrocious. Full of first time senior leaders who lack vision, business acumen, and basic people management skills. Their reactive nature will end up creating a culture of distrust. Some additional poor management qualities include: - intimidation of employees - lack of transparency around key business decisions - siloed teams and lack of willingness to work cross-departmentally There are not many known pathways for individual contributors for career growth. Culture is siloed, too. The People Team is working diligently to build a good culture, but a good culture needs to exemplified by the top line leaders. Current culture in senior leadership is brooding, arrogant, and egotistical.

The CEO only values and trusts engineers, and does not value input from people who don't write code. As a result, the leadership team consists of people who are good at writing JavaScript and bad at pretty much everything to do with their actual jobs: managing people, coordinating efforts in a large org, providing vision and strategic guidance, promoting a healthy culture, etc. Speaking of culture, Vercel is like a time warp back to ~15 years ago, when startups would post ads looking for Rockstar Engineers™ and "hackers", with ALL the baggage those early startups had. A lot of stereotypical tech bros saying and doing insensitive and immature things, chasing clout, and creating massive disruption in projects they wanted to stick their noses in under the assumption they're the smartest people in any given room. Such a total blast-from-the-past in terms of culture I half expected to see people post rage comics in Slack (I did see some Pepes, though, which is not a great look in 2023!). The worst offenders were leadership, so don't expect that to change until there's a scandal that makes the board intervene. Not my first rodeo, so I basically stuck it out long enough to not have to pay back my signing bonus and to line up a new job I like more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯