Kentik Reviews

My time at this company was marked by constant turnover, lack of support, and a toxic work environment fostered by unqualified leadership. Management often avoided accountability, frequently shifting blame onto employees, which led to a culture of scapegoating and fear. Rather than fostering growth, HR acted as a buffer for poor managerial behavior, offering no recourse for those dealing with abusive supervisors. There were no clear performance metrics or expectations, making it impossible to measure success or progress. Raises were non-existent — in fact, my salary was cut by 25% without warning, yet I was still expected to maintain the same workload, along with additional responsibilities. The company promotes an “unlimited PTO” policy, but in practice, using it is penalized. The expectation to be constantly available made work-life balance impossible.

Software is hard. Even moreso when you take over an existing project that's been alive for almost 10 years and even more so when that project has over 50 developers. But what I experienced at Kentik was one of the most demotivating, unfortunate missteps in my career. I could say it's team dependent because it might have been. The issue wasn't the code as much but more rather the business logic -- which you'd expect for a project that have been alive for almost 10 years to be a lot -- and it definitely was. For the first few weeks, I was told I was "ramping up quick" and "doing well" then 1 week, out of nowhere, I took supposedly too long on my first feature was told I needed "to be quicker". It didn't matter that everything was abstracted beyond belief and literally every single thing was nit-picked. There was a certain way to certain things needed to be done. The funny thing was is that I was told I was doing things "too quickly" which resulted in a lot of turns backs on code, so when I took my time, guess what happened? I took too long. You just couldn't win. They wanted you to be fast, efficient and correct all on the first try or two. The bigger issue was that they expect a new developer to ramp up in less than 3 months on a project that has over 10 years of code comparing their output to developers who had 5-8 years on the codebase. Maybe you should set your expectations lower. Because that's unfair. If not that, the first sign of struggle shouldn't be a warning of "you're too slow." Then the month of Christmas, I was let go after one warning -- right before the holidays. Harsh. Even more so when no one is hiring December so you're already a month out of pocket. Cruel. Another thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the way one coworker talked condescendingly to me in the code reviews. It truly made me feel unwelcome and uncomfortable. No one really said anything. I didn't bring it up because I thought it'd be obvious. At the end of the day, I was let go because I worked too slowly despite being told things the opposite. I was given confusing directions with one warning and let go right before Christmas. Truly heartless. I've been in the business for almost 12 years so for this to my first time that it "didn't work out" made it obvious that maybe it wasn't me but perhaps the over-eager manager who wanted results with an unrealistic timeline while seeing other people in other teams succeed while his new hire was taking a bit longer "perceived" to ramp up in the 3 short months I was there. I would not recommend Kentik to anyone in any way shape or form as it truly made an indelible dent of sorrow in my life.