Pros
- Ooyala has a refreshed executive management team that's hyperfocused on customer satisfaction, completely and entirely. This is actually unlike the previous three executive management teams that were hyperfocused on golf scores and securing personal credentials as viable C Level Corporate Hobiests for their next gigs while the business burned to cinders at their feet. - Ooyala offers a fantastic opportunity to work with outsourced IT vendors brought in to shore up gaps created by persistent brain-drain in the wake of poorly throughout and executed layoffs by an inept, insensitive interim management team. - Tons of parking at the company's new, smaller yet still seemingly empty headquarters office located within stumbling distance of the San Jose International Airport! - A very inclusive environment fostered by sales and marketing quietly cracking inappropriate jokes in the break room or near the bathrooms or wherever they just happen to be standing at the time. Want to know about all to fun stuff the sales and marketing teams team gets up to at trade shows? Don't worry, you'll learn it pretty quickly. The company loves to talk about its sales and marketing teams. (Other teams? Well, aren't you happy the sales bros have such an awesome time on the company's nickle?) - Fantastic facilities chosen for cost over comfort. The most lush, sound damped portions of the office have been given over to sales, marketing, and upper management while the rest of the company lives in an unfinished industrial open-office squalor. Don't like working through deafeningly loud grinding, clanking, hammering, and drilling? Wear headphones. Two months after moving into the new San Jose office construction is still a daily, on-going thing. - A constant march of new and improved but really downgraded perks for working at the company. Lunches are at least still free and there are way more bananas in the break room that you could ever want. The coffee is bad but there's a Starbucks just a short walk away which is great because the office is such a horrible place to try to get work done.
Cons
- Crushing technical debt from years absent of competent supervision, especially in customer satisfaction and engineering. Lacking clear direction or priority whatsoever apart from an obsessive campaign of cost cutting, improvements or innovation to all of the company's platforms were swept out the door as talented engineers left seeking challenges more significant than polishing rapidly tarnishing brass. - The great sense of morale the company once had has largely been replaced by a low-level thread of cynicism, especially among technical staff. Successively bad decisions during and following a 14% laying off (that included the entire engineering team responsible for one of the core products), disruptive hyper-focus on cost reduction in favor of customer satisfaction, negligence in allocating resources toward maintaining critical internal infrastructure, and ever growing technical debt have sapped away most of the optimism the company once had. -There has been zero visible attempt made to stop the exodus of the company's talent, good employees are jumping ship out of frustration. This has been so persistent it's not uncommon for somebody to ask you--with absolutely no note of irony, humor, or sarcasm--if it's your last day when you walk from one end of the office to the other carrying a small box. More than once a day. - Zero technical hiring in the Silicon Valley office if there's actually any direct technical hiring happening at all anywhere within the company. All technical back-fill appears to be funneled to outsource vendors. - For individual contributors there are no career paths at Ooyala. With the seeming freeze in hiring there's no expansion to any of the teams with direct hires and thus no opportunity to shift among teams or to move up within either individual contributor or management tracks. - Ooyala has lost anything resembling a culture of any kind. People used to hang out around the office on their time off to work on projects because they enjoyed being at the company working with the people at the desk across from them. Ooyala used to host technical meetups for open source communities and host regular hackathons. In the last nine months this has completely evaporated. There's no longer a sense of value or reward in being connected to the people you work with in any way deeper than the 9-to-5 clock. The company has completely lost it's sense of fun.