Amateur hour - Anonymous employee Skytree Employee Review

1.0
23 Sept 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Some of the smartest and nicest people work on the Engineering and Data Science teams. Sadly many have left.

Cons

Where to begin? Founding team has roots in ivory towers of academia and it shows in their general lack of experience and amateurishness. The CTO is erratic and prone to fights of fancy. We once went through a 2 month death march period when the man publicly emailed out roll calls of employees coming in over the weekend and staying late on weekdays, implicitly shaming those who wanted a semblance of work-balance. As with the CTO, Product Management is also a joke at this place with no real experience in the industry. Product roadmap has frequent changes and feature requests are often not well thought and it isn't uncommon for requirements change from underneath. Given that deadlines are often forced on the engineering team, entirely guided by external factors such as ceaseless need to play catchup with lies management has been selling the investors and a barely existent customer base. This has resulted in a steaming pile of a code base. To top this off, HR was pretty unprofessional surprisingly bureaucratic minded for a startup. We had no peer reviews, no feed was ever shared, your performance was whatever the management said it was. A lot of good people have left the company as a result. While I do honestly get the need for "fake it till you make it" when you're a scrappy startup, Skytree's exaggerations go well above any sense of proportion (10,000x faster than other solutions *barf*). The website overstates the number of paying customers and barely anyone uses the flagship product "Skytree Infinity". All in all Skytree has been singularly the most stressful, unenjoyable and an unprofessional experience in my career.

Explore other reviews about Skytree

5.0
11 Jul 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I like the culture of the company a lot, it is a bit like an academic group (not surprsising since it started as one) but with much better pay and way less politiking. Interesting projects and very capable knoweledgeable coworkers and superiors, very open to new ideas and technologies. Frequent guests from universities and research labs. Flexible work arrangements, flexible hours.

Cons

We are a startup and with it come the usual startup cons, e.g. an occassional crunch time where something *HAS* to be done today, longer work week - 45-50 hours seems about average. As far as company specific cons - I really can't think of any.

5
2.0
19 Jun 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Interesting cutting edge field with potential for career advancement if you can take the pressure and thankless work environment.

Cons

When I was with Skytree: -- High stress, last minute deadlines were common, and celebration of successes was hollow and un-satisfying. -- Management talked a lot about going to battle and destroying competition. Very aggressive/defensive approach to business and people. All fight/flight, very little real passion & excitement for life. -- Management was obsessive & high-strung, which led to a culture that was the same. -- Compensation was significatnly below market rate, and management had a habit of promising advancement but not delivering on it.

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