Ranker Reviews

Ranker.com is as ugly as the south-bound end of a Holstein heifer, and the day to day office operations mirror that perfectly. The amount of backbiting, undermining, and emotional abuse perpetrated by management is downright shocking, and the number of people who have left this company because they can't handle the inhumanity of it is higher than anyone would like to admit. This is a company where the higher ups wear horse blinders and make little effort to improve company moral, instead using people until they can't take it anymore and then happily disposing of them. What managements tells you to your face is rarely the truth, and management is only too happy to keep the confusion swirling by wasting time with distracting and frankly idiotic attempts at fixing problems which ought to be at the end of their priorities. The people in power are spineless and spiteful, and always take the easiest route, even if it means allowing a sexual harasser to remain employed by the company while those who brought claims to light are punished. If you want to be subjected to the rantings of the Napoleon complex embodied, then by all means go work at Ranker.

Ranker pays well below market rate for writers and editors. Once, a manager described associate editors in a meeting as "just bodies in chairs." That should give you an idea of the ingrained toxicity in the company. Ranker expects editors to work long hours (usually 9-6 if you eat lunch at your desk) and adhere to Byzantine management structure and guidelines. This is while being paid literally minimum wage in some cases. If you raise a complaint, the most common response is "this is just how things work at a start up." The thing is, the company has been around for 10 years and has around 100 employees. Editors are treated like second-class citizens. People in other departments look down on editorial, and employees are referred to as "the kids" in upper management meetings. To be clear, 28-year-old professional editors are called children by their employers. It's a running joke that members of the product and dev teams can basically get away with whatever they want. They once got a pizza party because the team members showed up to the office before 10:30 AM. Seriously. There's a gross imbalance in the way certain members of the company are treated. That's not a millennial snowflake perspective. No one's expecting day care. They're just expecting to be fairly compensated for hard work. That's to say nothing of the casual sexism and racism. It's very much a boys' club, with all that entails. Once during a meeting the CEO stopped to ask every woman in the room what they thought of doing a makeup vertical. Because girl stuff. Another time while introducing a new employee to the company (she was of Korean heritage), he suggested that she start a K-Pop group with the office manager (who also happened to be Korean). Women are consistently described as either "emotional" or "too quiet" in performance reviews, and God forbid you try to speak up during a meeting while white men are talking. A real fun time. Also, the content itself is soul-sucking. Management won't pay decent rates for writers, so editors are sometimes forced to re-write entire pieces. The whole operation is myopically focused on Facebook traffic, which explains why they grew too quickly too fast and have since had to lay off employees. TL;DR - Avoid Ranker at all costs. It's a sinking ship and the ride down will be awful.