Turing Reviews

3.5

62% would recommend to a friend

(739 total reviews)
avatar

Jonathan Siddharth

73% approve of CEO

59% positive business outlook

Turing has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 739 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Turing employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

739 reviews
1.0
17 Oct 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Work from home if you're an engineer - Salary is a bit higher than local rates if you're from a third-world country - If you're looking for short-term gig and some experience working remotely, maybe this is the company for you :)

Cons

- Disorganized, executives aren't informed of each other's decisions, engineers receiving direct orders from these conflicting decisions get penalized -You're urged to give a positive review on Turing at Glassdoor so you can receive bonus scores on your performance review. (You’ll send your review to a high-ranking manager so he can record this.) How can you give honest reviews on Glassdoor if you're being graded on your reviews, right? (As of this writing, I have obviously left) - In their ads, they tell you they'll connect you with a Silicon Valley company but that's actually them -- they'll be hiring you directly instead to build their platform. I've stayed here for 6 months but I never got connected to another company - Not US rate (but you can earn well if you're from a 3rd-world country) - I never had a contract even when I've asked a couple of times, as I've agreed to work full-time - A high-ranking manager I've directly worked with tend to always be rude, there are ways to give feedback without being too rude but he seems unaware of that. Cultural differences, perhaps you'd do well here if you treat your "superior" like a "superior being" and you just follow orders. - No QA team -- you'll be doing QA on your own - No sprint planning, no clear separation of concerns but you take all the blame for mistakes and missed deadlines - No proper code review process. Sure you make a pull request, but the code review isn't deemed too necessary. They don't even use a linter. They're perfectly fine with poorly written, poorly formatted code as long as you meet their deadlines. - Most of the people I've worked with here don't seem to have good command over the English language, even though the company advertises that their pre-vetted engineers first undergo a "rigorous" English test -- I did ask about this test (I never had it) but I didn't get a reply on this issue. An engineering manager doesn't speak nor write well in English either, it's often difficult to communicate with him and if you don't understand what he's saying he'll assume you're stupid and not that he actually has problems communicating - Not a company you'd work for in the long-term. Remember that it's a startup, they can fire you anytime they want. There's no contract, no benefits, etc. You'll have to trust that they'll pay you (but you have no contract so you’ll really just have to "trust" that they'll pay you, and yes, they do pay you but it can get delayed for up to 2 weeks) - If you're looking for job security, this isn't the company for you - If you're looking for a company that won't treat you like an expendable resource, this isn't the company for you - It encourages a culture of being a "suck-up", you'd feel like you need to be a politician to excel here, the environment is also conducive for politics, you just have to be more visible to everyone, package and market yourself to the company, be congenial so you get reviews from different people and receive bonuses

2.0
10 Aug 2019

Early start up

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1. Free lunch 2. Stocked Snacks 3. Culture, everyone below upper management is awesome 4. Automating a lot of the jobs

Cons

1. Most positions are 1099 not FTE. (No benefits) 2. Unorganized. Not built to scale 3. Paid monthly, between 7th - 10th 4. They emphasize working remotely, but don't trust their employees to be remote 5. No clear vision for the products, will change product mid-implementation 6. Most PMs are fresh college graduates with no experience 7. Despite their jobs saying "college" required, they'll hire high schoolers 8 They know their goal, but don't have a roadmap to it 9 Churn rate is very high 10. Little to no training 11. Despite being 1099 you're required to be in office 8-10 hours a day 12. Unprofessional work environment 13. Cramped office space note: most reviews are positive because they require it from everyone.

1.0
2 Dec 2022

Layoffs and Questionable Practices

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Remote First Company // Decent Pay // Unlimited PTO (Companies do this so they don't have to pay out unused PTO if you end up leaving) // Solid benefits

Cons

Turing has conducted two significant layoffs in 2022. The first one was on August 25th and the other on November 30th. This is quite surprising given that an announcement was made at the end of 2021 that they booked an $87M investment, which subsequently gave them a $1.1B valuation. (See TechCrunch) How is it possible that less than a year after you book $87M you're making two layoffs? Shareholders/Investors must be livid. On August 25th the CEO announced the first wave of layoffs, which was very unexpected for the entire organization given that Turing was supposedly cash heavy. In that announcement, Jonathan S. (CEO) assured employees twice that there would be "no additional reduction in headcount." That statement was complete b.s. Who is responsible for making multiple egregious hiring errors? Fast forward to November 30th, another unexpected layoff occurred ... 95 days after the first layoff. Layoff decisions don't happen overnight so how soon after the first layoff announcement was made that they were discussing another wave? Something else that is worth noting is that the CEO and various leadership told the employees, who were not laid off, that if they have any contact with those that were laid off that they should contact various leaders at Turing. Turing wants to keep things "hush hush" because the whole goal is to IPO and you can't have a successful IPO when laying people off becomes public. The Turing platform is extremely questionable. The platform boasts that it vets candidates to a "silicon valley standard" but many of these candidates can't even make it past the first interview because of a lack of technical or soft skills. It's true that there are customers leveraging the platform to build their technology teams, but the platform functions more as a database for candidates vs. an innovative solution that bridges supply and demand. For decades traditional staffing companies have been using databases to find known candidates. Turing functions as a global staffing company that happens to have a pretty database that decision makers have access to, but under the hood/behind closed doors its pure chaos. To date, the platform can only "vet" for engineers and it's doubtful how good this vetting process truly is. Turing recently announced a "Teams" offering, which is an empty promise to prospective companies that they can spin up cross functional teams to deliver on projects. The platform has zero vetting engine for PMs, QA, DMs, UX, etc. If a company asks for candidates that are not engineers Turing will say they can provide those candidates via our platform, but under the hood they need to go recruit for those roles, vet those candidates, and/or go into the database to find a candidate who might have those skills. There are so many other things I can touch on, but I wanted to shed light on a few key issues so future candidates and customers can make an informed decision on whether or not Turing is the kind of company they want to align themselves to.

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Glassdoor has 1,360 Turing reviews submitted anonymously by Turing employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Turing is right for you.