Reverb Reviews

3.6

62% would recommend to a friend

(85 total reviews)
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David Mandelbrot

47% approve of CEO

43% positive business outlook

Reverb has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 85 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Reverb employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Retail and wholesale industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

85 reviews
1.0
21 Jan 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good work life balance - Soft t-shirts

Cons

- More silos than a silo factory. You are encouraged to not document anything and work alone. Different teams rarely, if ever, interact. Engineers here take "job security through code obscurity” very seriously. - The codebase is shockingly slow and unstable. Servers take about 20 minutes to spin up. Many pages don’t load locally. If anything goes wrong with your server, there is only one person at the company who knows how to fix it (see con #1). There is no culture of maintainability. - Engineering leaders are very sexist and at least a little bit racist. Here are just a handful of quotes from a member of engineering leadership: - “I wasn’t going to promote her because she’s pregnant, so I figured she would be too busy” - “I don’t care that you kept getting excluded. It’s not a woman in tech problem, it’s a you problem” - “Well if I moved you to a different team, how would I get a woman’s perspective here?” - Salary bands are commonly broken, DEI efforts are weak, and there are no department-specific or leadership-specific metrics. What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get fixed.

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Reverb Response
3y
Thank you for sharing your concerns. Reverb takes its responsibility to protect its employees from harassment and discrimination seriously. We are committed to maintaining a discrimination-free workplace, where employees of all demographics feel safe and supported. Reverb employees participate in regular, interactive anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training, and are encouraged to report any instances of workplace misconduct to an anonymous whistleblower hotline or to Reverb leadership, who are trained to address any issues promptly. When Reverbers share their concerns, we respond by collecting the facts, interviewing others and investigating as needed, and finding a resolution that ensures all employees behave in accordance with Reverb’s exceptionally high bar for respect and inclusion in the workplace. Reverb has invested in DEI intentionally and thoughtfully. Part of this work is recognizing the ways in which we need to continue to improve, and we’ve leveraged data to establish our strategic DEI roadmap. Another part of this work is Reverb’s commitment to advancing a culture of inclusion, psychological safety, and continuous learning for all employees. We’ve established and grown Employee Resource Groups serving employees from underrepresented backgrounds; invested in intentional mentorship opportunities for women, gender nonconforming people, and people of color; and we’ve also established reporting and accountability mechanisms to advance our representation and retention goals across the organization, including equitable recruiting processes, performance management, and pay equity. In addition to our DEI goals, we’re responding to requests to strengthen collaboration by planning specific, more purposeful connection opportunities this year. We’re committed to fostering human connections – not only on our marketplace, but also with each other – which is why we have implemented new ways to connect and inspire each other, no matter where we are located. Some examples include creating cross-functional planning groups and meetings, using collaboration tools, and introducing biweekly show-and-tell sessions. Finally, regarding our codebase, our application is designed to be iterated on constantly and redeployed by engineers many times each day, and we've continued doing so even with the growth of our team and business. That said, as with any complex and evolving technical system, reducing friction for engineers continues to be an important priority. We've recently completed, or kicked off, numerous initiatives to improve the developer experience, including upgrades to developer laptops, improved documentation, and the simplification of our deployment and runtime infrastructure.
1.0
10 Feb 2018

Too abusive for what it's worth

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazing employees, truly motivated and talented. Free health insurance which is nice, cause you'll need it after you spiral into a deep depression from the abuse.

Cons

CEO is a bully and verbally abusive. HR and Recruiting spend most of their time gossiping about employees. This isn't an environment that really supports growth, they just want you to keep your mouth shut and your head down. CEO has no problem berating employees in front of other employees. Because it's a start up they have that cult like mentality where everyone feels like they need to applaud the CEO for being a "genius". He's not a genius, just a man with a bunch of money that piggy backed off an idea.

1.0
12 Dec 2018

Extremely problematic working environment

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are some very wonderful and smart people there

Cons

Hard to name all of the cons to be perfectly honest... I've never had a more problematic working experience in my entire life I watched an extremely high number of people have complete breakdowns while working here. Sadly, some of them are still employed there and suffer from massive amounts of stress and depression. While many people, especially management encourage hard work, going the extra mile, etc, this ultimately causes massive burnout which was hard to watch and met with zero sympathy. There is almost no HR to help you. ZERO work life balance. The ideal employee from Reverb is someone who will go to work each day, take no breaks, and in their off hours spend all their time and money on the site. They encourage musicians to work there, but 100% of the musicians that worked there in the 16 months I was there were barely active as the job is so demanding. I knew multiple people who quit for these reasons or developed physical ailments from stress/overworking Ego: Many of the employees here are young and with that there is a massive amount of ego problems here. There was a massive public call out culture while I worked there which was embarrassing and remarkably harmful to the spirit of employees. With a young staff and combined with the egos mentioned before, there is an alarmingly problematic discourse between employees and management that leads to verbal abuse and an absolutely miserable working environment Diversity: Very low diversity besides egotistical white men David Kalt (CEO) is a massive ego maniac and truly delusional of his role in the music industry. There were weekly stand ups where it was hard to physically cringe at the things he would say. I would say that David and upper management spent SO much time talking about how great it is to work at Reverb while working at Reverb to even notice the awful feedback loop they were creating and spending all of the time talking about culture instead of creating it I really wanted this to be a great position as I was a big fan of the website. I've never had a job make me feel so bad about myself and regretted ever convincing myself to stay there as long as I did.

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Reverb Response
7y
From the entire management team at Reverb, we want to thank you for providing this feedback and let you know that we take it to heart. The health and well-being of our employees is our primary concern. We want to hear unfiltered feedback from the entire team which is why we've implemented different tools like surveys and a hotline, but we fully admit that we don't always get it right. A review like this will push us to do better. We're sincerely sorry you had this experience and wish you all the best in the future.
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Glassdoor has 87 Reverb reviews submitted anonymously by Reverb employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Reverb is right for you.