Looks slick from the outside, but chaotic and frustrating in reality
Pros
Some nice people work here. The tech was exciting back in 2014. Free lunches. Everyone got a free Amazon Echo to distract us from the reality of the situation. Work life balance is good because most people no longer see the upside of overworking themselves when another restructure is on the horozon.
Cons
Redundancies & attrition - company performance is very poor, but to tackle this, they've decided to let a number of quality, experienced people go in all offices and departments. The brain drain at all levels and departments is severe. A lot of senior product, marketing, operations and engineering people have moved on and not been replaced. Poor leadership - at all levels. From the CEO who has overseen every bad decision in recent years, to shockingly poor middle management. Management is only interested in managing up unfortunately. Very few people have been promoted from within and they are usually bad choices. Salary and package is not competitive. The company does compete with Google/Facebook/LinkedIn for comparable roles. As a result, questionable hires are made as the truly great people go to those companies instead. Game of Thrones (executive edition) - a fun game to play is to look at the leadership page on the UK site, and compare it to the leadership page on the US site. Oh look, there's a VP of Engineering on the UK site, but not the US site. That's another casualty in unending turnover in executive leadership. I love that they fire members of the leadership teams but forget to remove them from the international sites. There is constant turmoil at the top and this filters down in various manners of unpleasantness as the average workers deal with the fallout of yet another restructure initiated by a bruised ego. Questionable positioning - oh hey, we're an "AI" company now. We were a programmatic/machine learning/RTB company over the past 10 years. Interesting that the new CMO shows up, throws his favourite marketing buzzwords into the mix and that's our direction now. Does no-one else see that the CMO is busier promoting himself instead of the company? A rebrand is the lowest of the low hanging fruit and an easy win for him. Learning & Development - forget about it. There is nothing happening on that front. Unless you are very junior, you will learn nothing to add to your experience. All new experience and skills are hired externally. Be very careful about joining Quantcast as an experienced hire, unless you are excellent at political game playing. Stagnant product - has not been updated in many years. The market has passed the company by and QC has done nothing to address concerns around transparency, pricing, margins, brand safety and also nothing in adapting product suitability for the markets in which it is sold. This is worse in EMEA than in the US. Promotion process - it's painful. Too many times, good people are passed over and instead they promote the unqualified person that was friends with a manager in their old company. It ends up in a cross departmental political shouting match where managers from one department shout down the promotion choices of another department. Absolutely infuriating. Workflows and restructures - daily workflow is not clear and changes all the time. Entire departments have been in a constant state of re-organisation for years so the goalposts are constantly shifting. This is not a stable company. Changing the company focus - the old products may as well be dead as the focus of the company is shifting to something else. That means all remaining resources are working on this new vision and all the existing products are likely to stagnate further.
