Has been and will continue to head downwards - Technology iHerb Employee Review

1.0
18 Jul 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people that work here are very smart and very driven. The company is good at trimming the fat and new hires are typically a good culture and intelligence fit. There are snacks (most of the time). The office is nice, the location is great, and HR tries to accommodate everyone well. There are ping pong tournaments and cool technology stacks to work on. High potential for fun projects since the company is in a really interesting spot in the industry and they have the money to expand rapidly. Casual dress code.

Cons

There is no communication between technology and the C-levels. The upper management makes decisions that affect hundreds of employees without so much as a consideration for their sanity. Newer technology managers have started to create a no-win culture for developers who have been promised raises/promotions/advancement but then have been told to "wait until October" even if they are very deserving of advancement (they just look for new work in the meantime and are actively leaving). Many of these managers are "yes men" and don't care what affect their decisions have on the employees below them. The CTO is defensive of only the technology team and doesn't trust any of the product managers. Snapshots (employee reviews) can often be surprising as many managers are timid about bringing up things they see or they form opinions that are not based on facts which leads to some people receiving undeserving negative reviews and write ups despite doing technically great work. Lots of gossip about employees and their reviews and why so-and-so left or when they will leave. There are no job descriptions/duties/goals for anyone that has been at iHerb for more than 1 year and "goals" are given to employees that don't align with perceived job tasks or are given for things they have no control over. Projects come up out of nowhere and are given seemingly random deadlines without consulting the people actually doing the execution. Higher ups don't see the big picture value of the company and instead focus on minor updates that don't affect the target markets that are needed to expand and succeed throughout the overall global market. Higher ups come up with random ideas and then shift the entire strategy to those ideas without so much as a care for a roadmap. The company is experiencing growing pains yet the smartest/most tenured people drop at the rate of ~1 per week because they aren't being treated fairly and deserve (and find) jobs elsewhere. The employees at the Irvine office only want to see the company succeed but are downtrodden when they aren't able to execute on the projects that will get iHerb to that level. There are several instances of people in management positions that should not be there across the company.

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iHerb Response
6y
Thanks for your feedback. We will try to answer relevant specific feedback. It’s true we are becoming a more mature company and doing compensation adjustments and promotions for everyone on the same date annually which is industry standard. We’re aware some of our existing employees are not used to this, but the majority of companies have the same policy so it will be a good learning adjustment experience for them whether they stay or leave. There is a common theme of saying the CTO or managers don’t trust certain groups of people, but we definitely do take feedback and collect evidence before making decisions. To keep confidentiality we don’t quote 360 peer feedback word-by-word but our managers do and are expected to continuously take that into account and go based on facts of delivery and not self-perception of doing a “great job”. In the case of goals, we are using SMART goals, and it is also a collaborative effort between employee and manager. The manager will set goals that they believe are relevant to the business and the team. If they don’t align or are unrealistic, the employee can/should always engage in collaboratively updating the goals. The executives and C-levels mentioned do research on current market trends and make decisions based on what they’ve collected. There definitely can and will be some misses along the way but that goes with the territory of taking risks to accomplish bigger potential feats.

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