WillowTree reviews about "pay"

A few thoughts: 1. We are desperate for business and will let a client abusive and over worked team for years to keep that business. The morale of being on these abused teams are so low that we have given up trying to improve this hostage situation that leadership has but us in with the abuser. 2. Desperation is woven throughout the work we do. I’ve never seen such poor work land on a client’s desk because we freaked out and rushed it. The lack of strategical thinking and quality work is embarrassing. I worry that out anxiety-driven mentality will just keep leading to terrible work not driven by the actually user needs. 3. Desperation hurts the entire team. The people doing the actual work, no longer get to lead where it’s going. It’s become a very top down culture where you are basically the hands of whatever leadership’s desperate “strategy” to save the client needs next. I’ve never seen so many brains waisted by this technique. I can’t remember the last time leadership asked our team what the client actually wants even though we work with them day to day. 4. Leadership skills are an actual joke. This is one of the biggest ones for me but I’ve never seen such a poor level of industry knowledge and craft in leadership. The head of design comes from marketing and doesn’t understand product design (it’s embarrassing). I don’t think our middle management has ever gone to leadership training or pushed their industry knowledge as well. This alone, burns me out more than anything else. It’s like a club of useless men commanding every designer to burn out while not even knowing half of time what they’re talking about. 5. Culture is the worst I’ve seen at any workplace. I was so excited to work at Willow Tree and to be in person before I realized that all of it was fake. Leaders weaponize lattice to make sure people constantly have a smile on their face. The team attends internal design meeting out of fear that if they don’t they will get bad lattice feedback which will eventually lead to layoffs. There is no loyalty of love but on driven through fear of showing any cracks in our forever forced disposition. This also leads to the designers themselves not showing the vulnerability needed to actually grow as a team and and to grow their craft. There’s not one designer on our team that plans to stay here more than a year. We’re doing portfolio reviews even, it’s bad. 6. The future vision stuff is incredibly cringe. True innovative thinking is driven through industry knowledge and user insights not the first buzzword you hear in 2023. It’s actually embarrassing trying to pretend like we are somewhat ahead of other agencies when our research department practices archaic and sterile methods that leads to little to no user insights. Also, no I don’t care about your book Tobias. It actually angers me that you spend more time talking about your book than your plans to fix the culture problems itself. 7. Telus is a joke. Being acquired by them is your own doom. Have fun having a telcom company leave you in scraps at the end with only the worker left that either are so deep in Stockholm syndrome they can’t see the toxicity over flowing or that are just so bad they can’t find jobs elsewhere. 8. Side note for anyone still considering: they’ll cut your benefits in middle of the year and not allow management to tell you. Your “raises” if you get them won’t even match inflation. Never go to an agency in the red in general. The pay is awful.

Leadership does not communicate their decisions effectively (if at all). Leadership does not take their employees feedback, instead they tell them to "disagree and commit" (translation: "shut up and do what we say".

I left WT a couple months ago. The environment was toxic, management wasn’t addressing any issues, and c-suite was pretending everything was going great. My breaking point was when one of my test engineers cried during a retro because of how terrible we were being treated by the client and how little WT cared. I was mad, this company had fundamental problems and I wanted to do something about it. Typically this is something you don’t feel comfortable doing because there could be repercussions, but since I was leaving, it didn’t matter. I went to my managers, I went to c-suite, and talked for over an hour about how WT needs to improve. How we are treated terrible by clients, how we get no support from WT, how c-suite feels out of touch, how the culture has died and to quit using us as a selling point, how we don’t get paid enough, how we haven’t received raises in 2 years, how we are not a boutique one stop shop for software anymore and are almost purely staff augmentation, how we as developers feel like a cog in the machine and we have no say into anything, how we get told to just “make the client happy”, how we get told to work nights and weekends because WT overcommitted and didn’t care to listen to the developers saying for months that we are not going to hit that deadline…. This is my experience, the toxicity I experienced everyday was 100% not worth the ~120k I was paid. I worked way too hard for a company that does not care about me for not enough pay. I left WT for another corporation that has issues, but it’s not toxic, and they pay me almost 100k more. WT is not a great place to work anymore, heck it’s not ever a good place to work. Don’t waste your time here, they wont change and you’ll just end up miserable.

Dying company consistent layoffs and low morale (no one really goes to the office, lowkey a pro) Slow promotion cycles (they reduced it to one a year)

Lots of bad business decisions have been made since being bought by Telus - in fact, I can't imagine WillowTree staying in business for much longer given the series of events in the last year. Almost everyone I work with is unhappy with the state of the company and are leaving. The only real incentive to work here was company culture but with so many unhappy employees who are leaving or looking to leave it's pretty much eroded. Pay isn't competitive. Promotion depends on your manager which can be good but can also be bad.

The only con I have for this is how Remote employees are treated. Often remote employees are overlooked for any engagement with the company. The company has shifted to a mindset of "Hybrid" but the President himself has admittedly despised the very idea of remote. The company tries to offset this by having WFA groups to connect with remote employees, but the big problem isn't the connection, it's the disconnect. In my tenure here, being remote, I've been moved around to new projects more frequently than my on-site counterparts. "Remote" to WillowTree is merely a bandaid for gushing wounds. They have recently taken to flat out no longer hiring remote employees only in egregious circumstances. I guess the thought is "Remote Employees are Lazy" despite me having demonstratable proof to the counter.

Low pay and equity compared to other digital product companies

Poor/untrusting management, lack of transparency, lack of pay increases, increasing staff-aug assignments.

Discrimination based on politics is typical. Pay is under the industry average, and they are offshoring roles to LATAM on a rolling basis. Morale is low, and turnover high.