Shutterstock Reviews

At first you're completely enamored by the beauty of the office, but peel back the seemingly beneficial perks of free food and getting to work in the Empire State Building, and you'll reveal a dark underbelly of distrust, fear of getting fired, and a complete lack of empathy from key leadership roles. The turnover rate is alarming, but the company fails to publicly address this and commit to fixing this cycle of bullying and unrealistic expectations that has trickled down from the very top of our leadership. I know at the end of the day a business is about making money, but at some point Shutterstock needs to flip the switch and focus on employee retention. They might find that improving employee happiness is the real key to growing their business.

It's hard to pick a thing to start with on where the cons are at Shutterstock. This is a company that's constantly in search for the magic solution that will save them and make them rich. Not a single person in upper management with any ability to make decisions has ever worked with a high functioning, highly scaled web site. That should be your big red flag right there. They're completely incapable of investing in basic engineering fundamentals to power their platform more than one outage to the next. Deadlines are quite literally randomly picked based on what upper management feels "reasonable" (despite what anyone below them claims how unreasonable with however much data to back it up). As a lowly employee, don't even think about missing a deadline because they'll shame you and pile the work on afterwards. You're better off launching a terrible broken product than delaying it even a day to do better testing / quality control. Deadlines are the golden metric at Shutterstock - not quality. The teams are partitioned and siloed, and there's absolutely no incentive to collaborate with other teams unless you're required to. The engineers there are all in a race to guard themselves from the mistakes of the other engineers on other teams at the company. There is zero ownership - teams are constantly throwing terrible code over the wall and then blaming them when it doesn't get launched. In order to launch one product (or even just relaunch an existing page) you have to coordinate between a minimum of 3 different teams, all of which have their own projects that aren't necessarily aligned with your goals. It's a constant mess of spending and acquiring political capital within the company just to do your basic job. As for work-life balance, engineers are thrown on to on-call schedules immediately with no training, no overview of the infrastructure and no runbooks. Pages can happen at any time and there's no desire to mitigate the pages waking engineers up in the middle of the night and on weekends. The page qualifications are determined by managers that they deem "reasonable", with no data to back up those expectations. To no one's surprise, managers are not the first, second, or third people being paged, as to not be inconvenienced themselves. I could go on and on about any other of the numerous aspects that makes this an awful place to work ... because they really don't do anything right. Save yourself the confusion, lack of direction and hostile work environment and go somewhere else.