Pros
On the surface, there is much to like about Anvato – Super Bowl, one of the companies that won the NAB Award, the opportunity to work with big clients. The company provides free lunch on Fridays. Also, the lunch area has plenty of soda, cereal, and chips, which comes in handy since employees usually eat at their desks on the other days. The compensation is slightly above average for Silicon Valley.
Cons
Extremely high rate of turnover - Excluding upper management, few remain. Upper management wants you to believe the turnover is due to poor engineers who were unable to perform. The reality is that there were plenty of “Top Performing” engineers who left due to poor communication, unrealistic schedules, and lack of consideration for employees’ personal schedules. Unrealistic hours - Employees are on call 24x7. Although they do not provide cell phones, upper management will call your personal cell phone whenever it is convenient for them (late in the evening, early morning, weekends). This is understandable if there is an emergency but this happens almost on a daily basis. If you do not pick up, you may be reprimanded publicly through group texts/emails. Unfortunately, it was common to see burnt out engineers at the office. Ad hoc work - is common and most communication by upper management is through email or the phone. There is no planning beyond a couple days. To complicate matters, some people from upper management have horrible spelling and grammar, leading to more confusion. The overuse of the words “top priority”, “urgent”, and “important” desensitizes their meanings and mask their tendency to overcommit themselves to customers. Employees are given more than they can handle. I consider myself a “learn it/do it yourself” engineer – someone passionate about technology. At Anvato, however, Engineers are often marginalized - having to learn skills that were completely different from the job position they interviewed for in a short time. For example, I’ve seen engineers who were hired for Encoding forced to work on complicated PHP issues for the Support team. There were PHP engineers who had to fix complicated bugs in Ruby or Front-end JavaScript engineers who ended up writing Android Unit tests exclusively. Again, this is to fill gaps that were left due to high turnover. Honestly, this could have been a good opportunity to learn new things if our engineers didn’t already have so much on their plate. However, in reality, this unpredictability is more stress/chaos than an opportunity to learn. Lack of transparency - Employees are not allowed to communicate that they are leaving the company till their last day of work or later. People tend to just disappear. *Cue Tumbleweed* As I mentioned earlier, on the surface, things appear great. Dig a little deeper and you may not like what you find.