SkyKick Reviews

The company is run entirely by directors hired through nepotism, rather than experience, competence or skill. These directors have created a top-down management structure where the primary goal is for their subordinates to make them feel important and powerful, rather than allowing employees the ability to work and think independently or provide constructive feedback without retaliation. Recruitment of new employees is based around selling the culture of "work hard play hard" and teasing recruits with the suggestion the options will soon be worth their weight in gold, in exchange for low starting salaries. They will claim these starting salaries are temporary until you "prove yourself" but in reality (and I know this from talking independently to two former recruiters) their primary goal is to hire previously unemployed employees at the lowest pay possible, and keep them underpaid for as long as possible. This has created a workforce mostly inexperienced and under-qualified to handle the issues and workloads placed upon them. Many, as I did, see the position as a worthwhile sacrifice, a stepping stone to a potential bright future of higher pay and higher status. It is not. To be fair, working at SkyKick seems like a lot of fun at first. After about a month everyone begins to see the overwhelming damage caused by years of awful mismanagement. There is no system, no process, no application that works in an efficient manner. Most of every employee's time is spent performing manual menial tasks that are sold to their customers as "automated services". As a support representative your job is effectively to continuously lie to customers, suggesting their issues with the product are unusual, or that their issues are related to a newly released feature that is designed to improve on existing processes. The bottom line is the technologies being sold only barely function and the unique niche of their particular type of service continues to attract new customers who don't know any better, and have few other options. New employees at SkyKick are pushed to the front lines to act as punching bags while the more experienced employees hide behind them and pretend like nothing's wrong while they drink free beer and play ping pong. Ultimately the worst part of working at SkyKick is the complete lack of standardized and objective measurement of employee performance. As a result, most employees realize that they don't need to do much work if they simply please the directors. This leaves a majority of the most difficult work to be left to a small subset of the newest and least experienced employees who are least able to handle the problems effectively. This structure has caused massive resentment from the individuals actually performing most of the work. And if anyone speaks up to say someone else is not pulling their weight, management turns a blind eye especially if that employee is good at pleasing the managers. About 1/2 the employees in the entire company do virtually nothing and are well respected in return. The other half do all the work and are not promoted if they have ever suggested the systems need improving or that others are not pulling their weight.

SkyKick used to pride itself on being a family that cared about its people. That couldn't be any further from the truth now. Barely 3 months ago they had an internal Quarterly review at which they told everyone how great the company was doing financially and the exciting projections for growth in the coming year. They then gave out Stock Options to people. Why give options to people when you are getting rid of them. That was especially nasty. After the Silicon Bank collapse (with whom SK banked) the CEOs sent out an email to everyone telling everyone not to worry that SK was fine and had all their finances squared away. Then came 2nd week of March and there was a 1 hour notice for a companywide meeting. In that barely 10 minute meeting they painted a completely different picture saying SK was in financial trouble and how sorry & heartbroken they were but had to layoff 48 people immediately. (Interesting Coincidence: 48 is just under the 50 person number that would subject them to the WARN Act which would require 60 days notice to employees of an impending layoff) Within 5 minutes of the meeting, emails from HR started arriving telling people they were getting laid off and scheduling an exit interview within the next 30-45 minutes. Rushed exit interview - because ostensibly they had 45+ more people live's to ruin. And then all access to company services was turned off. Didn't matter what kind of job you had (Dev, PM, Support, Marketing..), or how long you had been there (some people who had been there for 12 years) No loyalty at all, even to those people who had been there in the very beginning working 12-16 hour days, sometimes for weeks straight with no weekends off. Those people had helped set the foundation for the company. A lot of very good, loyal people got seriously screwed over - nothing like having to look for a job when the job market is already saturated with 10s of thousands of people who have also been laid off. General feeling internally is that the company has been lying to them and there is a significant amount of distrust. Engineering people are worried that SK is moving a much larger portion of their Dev work to Ukraine. People are polishing their resumes. Steer clear this will not be the Unicorn that the CEOs want you to believe that it will be. You don't layoff a significant portion of your workforce if you are on the right trajectory. BTW - SK may try and tell you otherwise, but compensation is about 30% less than the tech average. In a 'startup' you accept that because you expect to make it up when the company gets bought or has an IPO. Do not expect options to cover your salary investment into the company.