we hate engineers - Software Development Engineer onX Employee Review

2.0
25 Feb 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

We have extremely intelligent engineers working on apps that make a difference.

Cons

The whole company hates engineers, and I'm not being hyperbolic. We created an amazing app, and all we hear are complaints about it, and complaints about us. We're criticized if we don't behave in a way that's more suitable to a sales person than a software engineer. My peers expect me to be direct and to the point, logical, and independent. Every other person at onX expects me to interact with them in the way that they want, and they expect me to just know how they want to be interacted with. I never took a "soft skills" class when I studied computer science. I believe my professors fostered the traits that they thought would make successful computer scientists and developers. But that doesn't matter here. If you say or do something that offends someone, it can hurt your chances for advancement. And they get to deteremine what is offensive. Ironically, engineering leadership are probably the worst offenders, but were able to move up the career ladder. The behavior that we see from other departments like Marketing and HR can also very poor. It seems to be about the delivery. You can be as toxic as you want as long as you deliver it well. Or if people are scared to speak up, which is the case with HR. They can be very spiteful and mean. An attempt by us engineers to foster fairness in hiring also went south very quickly. We're not racist, but we also don't bias towards ethnic diversity. Part of that is Montana. Diversity here means hiring women. I don't have a problem with that, but it shouldn't be the only diversity initiative. We had one manager that advocated for us, and he's gone now. We saw what he went through here, and we don't blame him. It feels like we're taking shots from all sides, and our own leaders are pointing out the targets. It was nice having someone fair and level-headed shielding us. And someone that was not only a very good manager, but also a very kind person. No ego, quick to apologize when he was wrong, and that took away much of the anxiety of working here. It's devastating on a personal and professional level to see him go.

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onX Response
5y
Sorry for the delayed response. A lot has changed around us since you wrote this note. However, thanks for your feedback. You are correct that we have great app(s) that are getting better all the time and we have awesome engineers driving the development to delight our customers in partnership with others talent folks across the company. We love our engineers!!! We also work in a continuous feedback culture whereby we are all getting feedback with the goal of encouraging us to up our game and strive for continuous improvement of our products. At times, I personally find it can be exhausting and at other times energizing. We are celebrating the efforts of mentoring done by our senior engineers in their spare time has contributed to the development and advancement of some talent junior engineers some of whom happen to be female and/or minorities. If you are one of these engineers...thank you for your selfless gift to your co-workers. I hope you are staying well during the pandemic. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you want to chat about any topic. BTW- I think you hit the wrong tenure button on your feedback. Our longest tenured engineer at this company is 7 years. No big deal just confused me for a moment.

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Pros

OnX is a great company to work for. The treat employees well and provide a challenging yet engaging work environment.

Cons

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5.0
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Pros

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Cons

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