OfferUp Reviews

The senior leaders and especially those in engineering are disconnected at best. The company has multiple teams that have more departures than hires and their response has been to do nothing. I honestly don't know if they're just lying to try to keep people optimistic or if they're trying to hide their own incompetence. Maybe this is what they want? A number of the technical leads seem to be in over their heads and refuse to admit they need help, too. If that wasn't enough already the leadership have allowed an elite few to push their own agendas leaving the company down the road of using technologies based on people's opinions and preferences rather than deciding based on facts and requirements. Some of these barely-understood systems are in production use or are part of our critical path despite the fact that in some cases only a single engineer has background on them and everyone is afraid to touch them if that person is away. We're using a build system nobody uses because someone wanted it. What compounds that into an absolute disaster is that the inner circle has started using a "let's talk offline" tactic in chat to move any discussions about their failures away from being recorded. People put the absolute minimum effort into failure follow-up if they even bother to admit a problem happened and these behaviors just continue because there's zero accountability. Two executives (one the CTO) disappeared. The CTO returned but is no longer the CTO. Nobody seems to know what happened in either case and yet the company continues to pretend there's transparency. If you look outside of engineering at the product side of the house the story is no better. There are PMs and leaders running around trying to launch new features like their lives depended on it despite the fact that there is an ever-growing Mount Everest of technical debt that's being ignored. They continue to prioritize features and functionality over all other work leaving engineers scrambling for time to even write reasonable tests for new functionality. This isn't healthy and I'm going to join the others who have left soon -- I've started talking to recruiters, too.

Honestly, I have so much to say here that I don't even know where to start. I've had my share of good days and [many more] bad days, and I think you can take note of how I'm being treated here as indication of how you may be treated as well. Anyway, let's get to it. If you enjoy feeling like you're completely disposable, then maybe OfferUp is the right place for you! There used to be a time where that wasn't the case; I walked in every day feeling like the work I was doing made an impact, and I felt truly excited. Now, it's become just another job run by politics and some senior management that, without much experience, landed the job when we were a very small startup. OfferUp visibly prefers the opinions of management over the concerns of normal employees, and while they might seem to listen to you, your opinions will go in one ear and out the other. Cool. Hiring is crazy right now and has been for a while. We will see anywhere from two to eight new hires each week. That's awesome, except there was a previous review that stated how OfferUp would prefer to hire than promote, and while this might be different for certain teams, it is 100% true on my team unfortunately (I'll at least tell you it's a big team). Really, what a great way to motivate your team! OfferUp prides themselves in having a flexible schedule and great work/life balance, but that's actually a massive lie. This is one of those things that used to be great, but with such a huge cultural change with all of the new hires and management, you're basically expected to overwork yourself and nothing less. Let's get back to senior management and execs. I have not a single clue what [some of] these people do during the day. Lots of us feel completely out of the loop with where the company is going, and while they pride themselves in being transparent (and it definitely felt that way a year and a half ago), it is unfortunately the complete opposite of that now. From a product standpoint, you would think that we would like to work on some features that our users are asking for, at least to some extent, right? Wrong. Someone in senior management whose voice somewhat matters to the company decided they had a good idea and now we just do it. To further show how little power you get in your position, I've seen and heard some designers not even have a say when it comes to design/UX. That's literally their job. From what I can tell, we always seem to go for the "easiest and quickest" solution, which isn't alway the right solution, and that's just no fun for anyone. I quite literally am not very proud of a lot of the work we do. I don't entirely have much good to say about HR. We fill out an employee satisfaction survey every year and they get a clear answer on what the employees are asking for in terms of change and what will help us have a better work environment, and we're promised thing will change, and they never do. Never. I will say that there's like two employees on that team who are always willing to drop what they're doing to help you out, so thanks for that. There's probably so much I've left out, and it's so sad to see OfferUp go down the path it has. If things don't get any better, I can't say I'll want to stick around much longer. Here's to hoping we get acquired! (Isn't that sad?)