Smoking Mirrors...this place is a Zoo - Engineer Oddball Employee Review

1.0
16 Aug 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

If working from home is a pro, there ya go

Cons

My mental health, work-life balance, and professional confidence suffered greatly during my employment here. This company is mainly concerned with two things: image and bottom line. The bottom line (the profit) is the most important, and if you get in the way of it, you won't last very long. Even if it is on behalf of many individual contributors/teams in hopes of improving internal operations to promote long-term scalability. • Unrealistic expectations with workloads and communication. — Workload: The team members are constantly inundated with more projects than they can reasonably handle with timelines they can’t realistically achieve, and a lot of time is wasted with daily re-prioritization to meet the unreasonable demand. — Communication: Non Existent. This management team is all about gas lighting you, its a sickness. The lack of information between departments (the “sink or swim” culture that causes constant cross-functional misalignment), leadership and individual contributors will often come up with different answers for “the why”, leading to frequent communication breakdowns. ICs are responsible for making important decisions with 50% of the information they need to do so, but are 100% responsible when the breakdowns occur. • Lack of accountability for leadership There is a general unwillingness for accountability measures or anything more than minor changes to workflows to hold both members of leadership and departmental leads accountable for unrealistic timelines/expectations or missed deadlines/deliverables. There is no safe or comfortable avenue for discussing challenges with other departmental leads or leadership TO leadership, and no clear picture of WHO exactly is supposed to be holding those leaders accountable when they aren’t following processes, delivering their project pieces, or communicating effectively. • Disorganization In short: is rampant. Teams are constantly shuffled and restructured, people given new titles, individual contributors switched from one lead or department to another because the creative teams are not growing at the same rate as the demand. These “restructures” attempt to redistribute the unreasonable volume of work without hiring more people, resulting in a LOT of stress and uncertainty. But the solution of "more people" is rarely considered. • Cliquey There are certain people who have the CEO’s ear, and have far too much sway over decisions about things they are not actively involved in on a daily basis. The mid tier group of management here is so overworked and stressed its evident this is a sinking ship. This extends to who stays and who goes. Leadership does not apply equal weight between your peers’/direct reports’ experiences working with you and the clique’s opinion. I’d go as far as to say they don’t consider the former at all. Other reviews have mentioned the startling way terminations occur. I agree. I've seen so many excellent resources quit, some have even quit with no notice and I do not blame them with this toxic environment. Little to no information is given to the rest of the team when it happens, and it creates a lot of fear and uncertainty for individual contributors. Great people with years of experience and phenomenal work ethic were let go, seemingly on a whim or a bad day. • HR I cannot say I fully understood what the HR department did while I was there. Sometimes they were involved in HR-related conversations, sometimes they weren’t. It made for a relatively uncomfortable and uncertain experience, as I mentioned above, in regards to a lack of safe avenues to discuss workplace issues.

Explore other reviews about Oddball

5.0
7 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Hiring process: Everything from the initial discussion with recruiters, communication, and follow up interviews, the entire process from inception to completion was extremely streamlined. Hands down one of the best interview experiences. Culture: Culture is a hard one. We hear culture and buzz words like "family" all the time, lets be honest, no organization or team will be like "family", however, the culture baked into Oddball is one you'd want to be a part of. Team members are polite, courteous, up front and honest. During the interview process, team members carried themselves with professionalism but were also very human, this made for seamless conversation that flowed naturally like picking up a conversation with a old friend. Benefits: Oddball takes care of its talent. The offer a generous home office stipend to either update pre-existing equipment or purchase all new if you lack a home office. This benefit is huge and they are one of the first I know of to offer such a generous stipend to get you all setup. On top of the tech stipend, all other benefits offered are what you'd expect, health, dental, etc, and offer a wide variety of options to meet your and your families needs. Conclusion: While I am new employee, and have no point of reference or time in service to give more of an overview, my overall experience up to this point has been extremely positive. I would highly recommend those looking for remote work look into the opportunities Oddball has available.

Cons

I have no cons to call out.

1.0
9 Jun 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There were some, yeah. Not notably incredible. But, yeah.

Cons

This is where this company hits its stride. Back in high school. People loving people , People hating people, talking out of both sides of their mouth’s, a lot of talking behind backs. Focus on- serious focus taken away from the results of you having done your job and redirected back into the high school clique because getting the job done is ancillary to gossip and hatred. And if you bring this up to anyone there, your days are numbered I’d compare it to Roaching. Thinking you mattered.you’re cared for only to find out you’re not; but even further, you’re disparaged, bullied, harrassed . High school. You already went once ostensibly getting paid doesn’t even make it better twice

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