Wikia Reviews

I have been working at Wikia full-time for more than a year

Pros – - great, startup-like atmosphere
- challenging tasks
- developers have a lot of independence and power to make decissions

Cons – - a lot of projects are done in PHP, which is not the state of the art
- late working hours in European offices (HQ are in San Francisco)

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Wikia full-time for more than a year

Pros – I've been at Wikia for over a year, and over all its one of the better places I've worked. The culture is friendly, and most people work 40-45 hours a week. The engineering organization has been slowly growing in the US, and growing very quickly in Poland.

Its rare to find a place that is this enjoyable to work, that is one of the top 40 sites on the internet.

- Wikia has one of the best work life balances of any place I've ever worked.
- Good group of engineers.
- Some Sr. Management hires have been stellar.
- Great location, and beautiful offices.

Cons – While the above points are good, every place has its drawbacks.

- Poor hardware setups for engineering, with a (mid range mac w/ a 3 year old monitor)
- Lacks product vision
- Poor career growth opportunities

Advice to Senior Management – Work on a longer term product focus, and make bold choices regarding the product.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Wikia full-time for more than a year

Pros – * Collaborative atmosphere
* Lots of flexibility
* Plenty of interesting areas to work on, particularly around scalability
* Opportunity to collaborate on MediaWiki, the platform that powers Wikipedia (there are definite avenues to get your changes into core MediaWiki, which means they would be live on Wikipedia)
* Fantastic SF office, recently expanded, with great location across from South Park in SoMa
* Easy commuting from Caltrain, BART; reasonable private parking nearby
* Friendly environment
* Wikia's code is open-source, so you're getting paid to work on an open-source project
* The company is growing rapidly, meaning there's a lot of opportunity to take on new roles and responsibilities

Cons – * Commuting can be a pain any time there is a Giants game
* MediaWiki's coding conventions are fairly old-school as far as coding style and architecture goes.
* There is significant technical debt in certain parts of the product, but not much time presently allotted to work on addressing that
* The backend is mostly Perl scripts, so those used to "younger" scripting languages may have a hard time getting acculturated
* The company is growing rapidly, which means that growing pains can arise

Advice to Senior Management – It would be nice to emphasize not only product quality but code quality as well. Investing time into refactoring and testing would be time well spent.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Wikia full-time for more than a year

Pros – Wikia has a beautiful office with excellent support staff keeping things well maintained. The location is nice, right in between bart/muni and caltrain. The product is open source and has millions of enthusiastic users.

Cons – Every job has it's downsides, but the good far outweighs the bad for me here. One challenge at Wikia is maintaining a very large product with a ton of features that sometimes aren't as well maintained as they would be if there were less features.

Advice to Senior Management – It's nice to have democratic processes but often things are too democratic and decisions just need to be made. This company can err on the side of democracy over getting things done.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company