Quite Toxic - Software Engineer Mersive Employee Review

I left Mersive because I was transferred to a dead end role, and wasn’t treated with interpersonal respect. Mersive was the only work place where I had coworkers cuss at me, at each other, and in meetings. It’s the only workplace where people have hung up on me during calls, argue a technical approach by cussing and raising their voice, and the first where I’ve had a manager make demeaning comments about my religion. Management was clueless as to a lot of how things went on, my “manager” had 35 direct reports and didn’t even know what programming languages we were using on our product. With the head of engineering having so many direct reports, unless you were one of his favorites, feedback was very arbitrary. I was told I was doing a horrible job one time, despite not being able to tell me specifically what I was doing was wrong or what I could be doing to improve. Which brings us to another theme at Mersive: how you are treated, what you can do, and if you can propose changes to a product or process are entirely based on who is a favorite employee. Want to work from home (pre-covid)? For some they could work two days a week from home, no problem. For others, that wasn’t okay. We had a coworker get a second job while working at Mersive, and if two of his other coworkers hadn’t brought up to their manager that this guy had effectively stopped doing his job, management would have never known given how many direct reports managers have. I would not join Mersive if you are going to spend any time on the smoke jumper team. If you do decide to join, I would get your exit date off that team in writing in your offer letter. The smoke jumper team deals mainly with very basic tech support, since they don’t let the support team have basic access to the tools they need. Be ready for tier 1 tech support questions like, “Is this person a user?” or to explain to Mersive’s own sales engineers, that yes to use internet enabled features you do in fact have to connect a pod to the internet. Management may say your time on the smoke jumper team is temporary, but it will be permanent as long as you’re at Mersive. Also don’t expect salary to commiserate with wasting your engineering skills on basic tech support. Nothing improves bad code like having other people fix the bugs introduced by other teams. The actual office environment was horrible. The office was very loud, with a lot of noise and barking dogs, and constant construction noises. Management made a huge deal about not working from home, so there wasn’t any way to work in a different environment . After renovating an office space, Mersive’s CTO decided he didn’t like how the paint looked, despite him having picked out the colors. Instead of waiting for the repainting to be complete, or to let everyone work from home for a few weeks, management decided they’d just paint the office during work hours and expose their employees to the paint fumes. Definitely the first office job I’ve had that managed to also include workplace hazards. Good job guys. COVID was great, because I could work from home and not deal with a horrible workplace and toxic coworkers.