WiredTree Reviews

3.0

44% would recommend to a friend

(23 total reviews)

Zac Cogswell

55% approve of CEO

26% positive business outlook

WiredTree has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 23 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The WiredTree employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

23 reviews
1.0
14 Oct 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Up to date technology and you get to take your laptop home with you. There's a bar literally downstairs and across the street. Good places to eat. Train drops you off a block away. Chairs are comfortable.

Cons

Management yells at you, talks behind your back, and prevents you from eating lunch. HR is the owners wife which if you ask me is completely unprofessional and a conflict of interest. HR also doesn't seem to have a clue on how to answer any questions you may have. Management even talks behind managements back A LOT. The infrastructure there is terrible. Cable management in non-existant. 12 hour shifts are very trying especially when you don't get a real lunch break. The turn around rate is about a year. They either fire you after that time or you will quit. There are employees there merely to snitch on others. The promises they make when you are first hired become mere dreams. Senior Admins have a god complex and almost laugh at you when you have a question. Training is terrible. Training was a workbook while the trainer surfed the internet not even helping with the queue. Floor manager is a nice guy but he is probably the one you want to watch what you say to the most. Many false misleading things have come from him too often. It seems like management is overworked just like everyone else. Pay isn't great and receiving a raise is almost impossible. Even if you are approved for a raise, they make sure to wait 3-6 months before actually giving you a raise. Employees have been fired unjustly with no warning or reason. You cannot eat at your desk so you starve until management leaves even though Management and other senior eat at their desks. Prepare for coats and gloves all year around. Even when people complain about numbness in their hands from the cold it is disregarded without even a simple compromise. If you increase the heat when management leaves they yell at everyone for electricity cost when all the employees are trying to do is stay a little warm because the temperature is set to 60 degrees.

avatar
WiredTree Response
11y
I am sorry you felt tricked. That is the last thing we want people to feel. It sounds like you were with us a while back based on your pros listed and we have changed and improved a lot of things since you worked with us over three years ago. To clear some things up in your post, we never prevented anyone from taking a lunch. We actually have a no eating at your desk policy to force people to take a break away from their desk and when working a 12hr shift. We also give everyone that works at WiredTree paid breaks, so you relax for a bit and recharge while you are on shift. That is why we provide unlimited filtered water, coffee, tea and soda and we also provide fresh fruit and snacks you can enjoy while on your breaks too. All managers on duty are instructed to ensure that people take breaks as well. It is an internal company policy that we have had for many years now. I am sorry you felt you couldn't take one. No one in management tells any of their coworkers they cannot take lunch. It simply doesn't happen. In in our offices, the heat and AC is set to comfortable levels and any manager is OK to adjust it for their coworkers. It's always been that case. I am sorry that it wasn't set your exact liking and you felt that it was too cold. It sounds like you are very upset with your time here at WiredTree and that you had conflicts working with your coworkers. We encourage all of our coworkers to talk to management if they are seeing someone else on their shift behaving inappropriately or are not working as part of the team. We do that to encourage a positive and healthy working environment for everyone here at WiredTree. I am sorry you don't like the fact that people would speak up to their peers and managers when this kind of behavior was impacting them in a negative way. We are sorry that you are so upset 3+ years after working with us. We wish you the best of luck with finding a job and work environment that makes you happy. Warm regards!
1.0
6 Feb 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Chances are you will assuredly learn things, both technical and not. You will get hands on with some current equipment and software, deal with reckless management, and learn to work under stress with difficult customers. These are things only experience can teach. They have fantastic chairs, which is good because you will be in them 12+ hours a day. Also, you will undoubtedly lose weight because you cannot eat during those 12 hours. Being thin is a plus.

Cons

WiredTree management is woefully apathetic. You can get nothing accomplished by attempting to work out any issues with them. Once you address issues they recognize you are a problem. This is especially troubling if there is a 'batch' of new hires recently; you can be assured one is going to be slotted for your spot. This is not an opinion. I have seen it happen dozens of times. Management tends to get their feeling hurt if you do not agree that you are happy. They take your issues personally and seek to end the relationship.The big thing that the management does care about is negative tweets. If you are the cause, look out! Staff is made to do impossible things in order to mitigate any troubling feedback. Most reviewers have mentioned this and I reiterate because it is fact. There are no lunches and there are no breaks. If you get up to use the restroom, you are glared at. When you get hired, you are told you get 45 minutes over an 12 hour shift. This simply has never occurred. You instead can watch them eat breakfast, lunch, and potentially dinner. You are allowed to smell their food, but to never eat your own. Most folks will wait until the managers leave and smuggle food to their desks and hope 'HR' does not walk in. There is a genuine rift between sections of staff. There is the group that was friends when the venture was launched, and there are the hires. You should be aware that you will be working in a hostile environment, moreso until you figure out who is on which side of the fence. You will not see this during the 'training period'. It will take a few months before the backbiting becomes obvious. Taking your grievance up with HR will not only get you a blank look, but now management is aware you have a gripe. I already explained how this will end for you. Likely there are some regulations not being followed between an obvious conflict of interest and the lack of being allowed a lunch. We might need to follow that up with the proper channels. The people you work with are great. In most cases they will extend help to you. Some weak ones manage to slip through the cracks. One in particular really stands out. She will duck and dodge any issues of relative difficulty. She targets tickets that are simple; password resets, firewall allows, etc. This allows her to have inflated counts of resolved issues, while you actually have to work to get resoolution with the issues you get stuck with. If a ticket goes sour she will duck out on it, and it becomes your issue. Managers are aware of this behavior and have never attempted to resolve it, regardless of the amount of complaints. WiredTree hiring practices include hiring large amounts of workers at a time. This is because of how fast people quit; most wash out during 'training' or soon after. The ones that stay are used to replace the admins that they are getting ready to fire. We are always short staffed. We cannot hire people fast enough. I have seen the workers roll 3 times fully since I started here. It is the most acute employee atrition I have ever seen. Forget about taking sick time or vacation. This must be approved in order to be used. As we are always short staffed, you are always needed in that chair. Shifts are 8AM-8PM and 8PM-8AM. You need to get out of the office quickly. At 8:01 you are on your time, you have to be back again before 8. Transportation, food, shower, sleep etc need to be budgeted into that 12 hours. Wages are low, and bonuses are small and done via a lottery system. It is a good start in the industry and as soon as you quit you can expect your wages to double. The key to working here is to know the truth, and know that it is a very temporary job. Management will try to sell you the dream, but it is not to be had here. If you have the chance look into the eyes of both the management and the employees. You will see exhaustion and desperation. Nobody here is happy(from what I saw week after week). As long as you know what you are really get into, go for it! I did.

avatar
WiredTree Response
11y
I am sorry that you seem to be so upset with your time at WiredTree, but there are some gaps in your review. You state that you are a Current Employee - Senior Linux Systems Administrator and have been for over three years. That position was just created late in 2014, so you can't really be a current employee in that position. We haven't even filled that position yet. Also, you state that people it takes two years for medical insurance to be free. If you were a current employee you would know that this policy changed back in 2014 and everyone gets 100% paid medical insurance after their 90 day training period. Lastly, this review is very similar to one that was posted on Aug 4, 2013 which talks a female coworker that "threw you under the bus" and you not being able to take a break. While it is clear that your time with us ended on a bad note and you chose to create a second post about your time with us, the only thing we can do is tell you that we are very sorry that our business relationship ended so poorly on your end. We wish you the best in finding a career that makes you happy. Warm regards!
1.0
18 Jun 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

WiredTree is an awful place to work, but it is a place to work. It's pretty easy to get hired there, if you seem to know your way around linux they'll give you a chance. And the people who survive more than a few months are quite remarkable, smart and hard-working and funny without exception, and somehow they deliver a high quality of service in spite of everything.

Cons

Severe, chronic, almost criminal understaffing. They're trying to compete against larger companies with a skeleton crew and the workload and stress level are off the charts. Every single day you feel like you're skirting the edge of disaster, and nothing ever gets better. Upper management is cheap, dishonest, erratic, unprofessional and almost comically disorganized. I think they're smart nerds who got picked on a lot and grew up to be frightened, angry and mean. They seem to be unaware of, or unconcerned with, the constant frustration faced by employees and refuse to take responsibility for anything. Their solution to every problem is to "push harder", "dig deeper", "go the extra mile". Training is minimal and largely irrelevant. Documentation consists of the google and a hit-or-miss wiki. Support policies are ill-defined, usually ex-post-facto and sometimes contradictory. There is no solutions database, no issue tracking, no trends analysis. Admins are constantly re-inventing the wheel. Back-end infrastructure is held together with chewing gum, velcro, and ebury worms. Like everything else about the place, it was thrown together in great haste and without a plan. Pay is very low and benefits almost non-existent. Bottom line, everybody, and I mean everybody, eventually gets fed up and quits.

avatar
WiredTree Response
11y
Thanks for your review of your time here at WiredTree. I can say that that we have been working hard on fixing any pain points that our staff may feel. I wish you would have provided this feedback in the 6 month staff reviews that we give all employees or gave us some of your frustrations in the monthly anonymous surveys we send out to staff. Beyond that, I would have had no problem sitting down to talk to you about your feelings about your career here and worked with you to make positive change. I am really sorry that you felt that management didn't care about your hard work. We truly care about everyone that works at WT and I feel that we have been trying really hard to get honest feedback such as this so we can make positive changes. I am not sure of the time frame of which you worked for us but we have been making changes based on employee feedback over the last couple years. To touch on some of them here are things we have done over the last year: * We have been working hard at hiring this year and we have bolstered staff levels on every shift to ensure stress levels remain low. * Better defining support policies and support best practices. * Moving our extensive support wiki to a best practices documentation database for exact answers to specific customer problems and remove all the dupe information. * Total training revamp started in January 2014 * Monthly issue tracking to pinpoint support trends Like all change, these have taken some time to get rolling, but they have already been making positive impacts on everyone's work here at WiredTree. I am sorry that you had such a negative experience with us. That is the last thing we want to have and I wish you would have brought up your feelings to us so we could have eased any of your frustrations. My door is always open to any of my coworkers to talk things out and I wished you would have taken the chance to do so. Regardless, thank you for your hard work and time here at WT. We wish you the best of luck wherever you work now and I hope that you find a job that makes you happy. Take care!
Viewing 1 - 3 of 23 Reviews

Glassdoor has 23 WiredTree reviews submitted anonymously by WiredTree employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if WiredTree is right for you.