Basis Technologies Reviews

Centro's promises were a lie. When I was hired, they promised flexibility, a positive work environment where learning from mistakes and growing were paramount, kick-ass benefits, and the opportunity to work on a possibly market changing product. By this past August, over two thirds of the engineers had quit. Earlier last year, new management was brought into the engineering department. They decided to stop all work on our main project and scrap what we had. This is the second time in as many years that all development work on this project has been halted, the app completely re-architected, and engineering yelled at because we didn't control scope creep (which is a product issue--our product team has been completely replaced three times in the last couple years). This new management were mostly consultants brought in to get a product out the doors. Suddenly, we had after work meetings lasting until 9pm. The entire engineering team was yelled at multiple times for questioning why development work was being completely scraped when a good portion of the code was really good, worked, and could be reused in a new product. We were often left in the dark about high level management decisions, only to be suddenly surprised that we were doing things not to management's liking. It was very confusing to be told one month that hey, we're doing things this one way, and then the next be screamed at in a meeting because we were doing things in the agreed upon way. One of Centro's big selling points are its awesome benefits: 15 days PTO when you start, plus 10 "Ferris Bueller" anytime days. The purpose of these days was to use them as freebie days, for any reason, as long as your responsibilities were covered. We were told that we weren't allowed to use Ferris Bueller days as intended, and anyone who used one needed "a good reason". Engineering management told us that Centro's work from home policies were too lose--we have many remote workers and several people live over two hours form the office (one direction) and specifically picked Centro because of the great remote working policy. From that point onward, working from home got people targeted for "having a bad attitude”, despite their actual attitude. The product Centro is building is unrealistic; it aims to be the be-all end-all of placing ads online. Larger companies have built similar products that target specific types of ads (e.g., video ads, text ads for certain platforms). This is supposed to support everything. Just hitting the main APIs for ad placement is a gigantic project, and engineering has had to rebuild this APIs multiple times since management keeps scrapping what we have. If you're an engineer and you're looking to work at Centro, work elsewhere. The benefits are great (PTO is generous, health insurance is awesome, snacks are provide in excess), but the drama, politics and nepotism will make you hate your job, as it did for me and over 15 other engineers. Centro isn't worth it.

People are overworked Company seems focused on making sure new managers have all the training they need (a good thing), but also backwards. Why not make an effort to notice people WHO WOULD MAKE GOOD MANAGERS and proactively train them to step into those types of roles? There are so many people in management roles that are simply bad at managing ... leading to frustrated employees who have to manage up, do all the extra work for their bonehead boss, all the while getting zero of the credit. Total boy’s club @ the top. Especially in sales. Not a man? Good luck working your way in unless you feel like being Shawn’s latest yes man, or you’re a hot chick. Leadership keeps pushing a message to their employees that if we all just work a LITTLE HARDER we’ll be profitable. No mention of the fact that the company’s vision and leadership is all over the place. Trust me, people are working plenty hard ... with fewer resources, no bonuses, no raises, etc. Where is the motivation to stay? Nobody wins here except for execs, who have been here so long. Some of them have NO experience in the departments/teams they’re running, are completely clueless, and push work off to already overworked staff. I assume they’re still here because they’re waiting to be bought out. $$$ Some of the female executives could stand to take a sexism 101 course. Career growth is 100% lip service. In fact, there’s company acknowledgement that people leave due to lack of career growth - so what’s the company’s solution to the problem? Push out more messaging about how it’s so great to grow your career here, with no actual evidence of that being a fact for employees and no actual plan of attack to make that happen for employees. It’s verbal dust.