FreeWheel Reviews

- We have way too many internal meetings, where most of them are utterly useless - Teams are siloed and there is animosity between the market’s teams. Teams fighting over who does what - International teams don’t get on. US wants to deprecate the legacy SSP, whereas the International teams want to keep it. No one knows what to do - LOTS of politics stemming from the acquisition of StickyAds. Senior management that have stayed through the acquisition are lazy and don’t do anything. As a result, it can be a toxic environment to work in - Salary lower than market average - Product & platform is a complete dinosaur. We can’t keep up with the competition because we’re too slow to release any new features - Those that have built the legacy product are very protective over it - There is absolutely no strategy from the Leadership team on how to move forwards. They have a great vision (“Flywheel”) but no idea of how to get there. It’s all talk, no movement - Some people are incredibly incompetent and lazy, so don’t expect to learn much - There is company restructure guaranteed every 6 months which brings no positive changes - Some people are given promotions that they don’t deserve. There is clear favouritism - We’ve just had a round of layoffs and yet the people who contribute nothing are still here!! - We can’t decide if we are a start-up or a corporate. Lots of red tape and slow movement - HR team can be unhelpful at times - Don’t expect to know anyone outside of the section of the office you work in

From a process standpoint: - Micromanagement in the agile process. You will always be handled the tasks and most of the time with deadlines attached. - A lot of red tapes and office politics ingrained in their process, so you've got to make people happy, or they will make your life difficult. - Their delivery process is a joke. They say they do CI/CD, but their delivery is monthly and manual, shifting quite often. - Do not expect to settle in a tight-knit team for a particular project. You are a resource to be allocated wherever and whenever needed and will be working in different teams and stacks. - People are too lazy to make proper Jira documentation, so very prone to confusion and misinterpretation. From the engineering side: - Their flagship software is a 20-year-old legacy monolith that is still maintained and extended, so expect to contribute to it very often. - On the monolith side of things, coding practices and design are terrible at best. Do not hope to make any impactful changes as it will be contested heavily on code review and eventually refused as "too much". - They acknowledge the legacy but are not rushing for a new one. They are only migrating some parts as side projects, so when it gets done, it will be obsolete already. - Code-wise, they follow java coding standards in a C# codebase. - Engineering culture is not focused on best practices and in many cases, it will be frown upon. - Code reviews take forever to complete, especially when done by people outside of context. - Their tech-stack is quite old and outdated. As for management and culture: - Their focus is always "going as fast as possible" so you can imagine the compromises at your expense. - They have way too many meetings, where most of them are utterly useless for engineers. - Client-oriented: management will always give to their demands. They don't know how to say no to them. - Open office with two other companies of the Comcast group. Staff do not interact with each other, and it feels weird, besides being very noisy at times of the day. - Management is usually not present in the office, but in the US, so they are prone to gossiping and will also not feel your pain. - Anything promised should be taken with a large bag of salt.