No Loyalty and horrible pay
- Job Type:
- Full-time
- Location:
- San Diego
- Submitted by:
- Anonymous
- Date:
- Wed Nov 21 2007
- Overall:
- Job Tasks:
- Social Environment:
- Management:
- Pay/Raises:
- Location:
The actual job duties were decent, as there is a lot of technology to work with, however you are forced to work 50-70 hours a week with most of the overtime being during the middle of the night or on the road to LA (which trips occur a minimum of 1-2 times a week, creating a lot of wear and tear on your personal vehicle).
Management has delusions of granger and has convinced the staff that they will be the next big thing, even though all of their technology is never perfected, it is simply put in a barely working state and then left alone to work on another project. The time frames for projects are unrealistically short and always affect the "raises" and "promotions" of the programmers and engineers. I say "raises" and "promotions" as such because raises are scarce and promotions are only given to those who brown nose, not to those who work the hardest. The engineers have to work so hard, I have met some that have worked on projects for days at a time without leaving or sleeping and still could not meet the timeline.
The project goals have such a heavy weight on the engineers goals that they often will go around best practices and company policies. For example the project isn't finished until it has been rolled out to the various servers and if they have missed the timelines of IT for rollouts, then they will get managements approval to override the policies and force IT to rollout the software, often in the middle of the night and/or on weekends.
The management in this company is the worst I've ever seen. Every 3-6 months they go through lay-offs right before their quarterly reports and taxes, to avoid taxes and to make themselves look better on paper. After the reports have been filed they then start hiring new employees to fill the shoes of the ones that were just laid off. This is also how they get around paying some of the engineer bonuses, which you dont get unless you stay for a year (which is not available for IT).
To sum it up, I wish everyone could read this article before accepting employment. I would not have left my stable position at my previous company to have come to sms.ac if I had read it. I could go on, but I think you understand.
Comments (1)
I use to work for the company in the customer service department, and we really got to see how the company makes money. They send out lots of unwated text messages to users and then bill them for it. I'm not sure if things have changed since then, but there were hundreds of fake accounts that sent out fake friend requests every few minutes - I personally had seen them, and in customer service we called them "ghost accounts". A lot of these accounts had recyled pictures from previous users who had cancelled. I remember answering a call once from a girl who had closed her account years ago, but now it was sending out comments and friend requests, and somehow she had found out becuase one of her friends had recieved a message from her? They even send messages to people who have opted out of recieving messages. We had a database that allowed us to look at what people had been billed within the last 6 months. If there was a cell phone number on file, there was no doubt that it had been micro billed - they figure that most people will not catch 50. to $3 over the course of six months - and if they do, they just give them a refund. I still dont understand why no one had every really caught on? I figure that the companies that allowed them do this were also out to make a quick buck. Anyways, they use to have a few years of billing history on file, but decided to delete it all and only keep the last 6 months - or at least that is what they told us. In customer service we felt that everyone who worked there was so oblivious. Everyone was always talking about pods, and widgets, and new features, but stuffed away in our corner we heard the real story: no one really uses the site - its a text messaging spamming company, and each voicemail and e-mail from the cusomers were threats and complaints. The people who don't complain don't really know what's going on, and the minute they find out that their being charged, the want out....fast!