Pros
1) I really, honestly love the people I work with. Nearly everybody who is a "boots on the ground" worker, such as in Engineering, Ontology, Annotation, Chat Agents and so on, is a joy to work with. I want to be exceedingly clear about this: There are so many wonderful people at this organization, and I’m better for having met them. 2) I was compensated well. Kind of. Eventually. 3) Hours were extremely flexible. 4) If you are looking for a startup environment and the kind of culture that comes with that, XSELL has it in spades.
Cons
In this section, I am going to be brutally honest about my time at XSELL. This is out of the hope that my previous and current managers will read this, take it into account, and make changes. If they fail to make changes, then I hope this review can serve as a warning for anyone who wishes to work here. For the record, all of the following criticisms are meant for upper management. They’re the ones at fault here, not anyone else. 1) Nepotism. If you read through this page, you're going to see the word "nepotism" come up a lot, and for good reason. Almost everyone in a high-ranking or upper managerial role was poached from a company that one of the highest-ranking members of XSELL previously worked with. I’ve had numerous conversations with coworkers where the phrases “war buddies” or “old boys club” came up, with exactly the sort of connotation you can imagine. In one memorable instance, a coworker explained to me in confidence that the reason our boss wasn’t able to make any headway in his proposals was because he wasn’t part of the “old boys club” at the top of the company. Incidentally, said boss just quit after less than a year. "Quitting after less than a year" is also going to be a theme in this review. There will unfortunately always be some level of nepotism in companies, particularly small ones. Nepotism at this level, however? In a startup? It’s unacceptable. In order to move a proposal upward through the company, you need to be a part of the right club. It isn’t enough to know the right people, and it doesn’t matter how hard you network. You have to have been HIRED because you know the right people. 2) Turnover. I’m going to be very frank: Whenever a new department head or member of Customer Success joins the company, I assume that they’re going to leave within a year, at the absolute longest. People see the level of disorganization and lack of clear goals in the upper levels of the company and they quit. I once tried to reach out to a coworker I was working closely with on a project, only to find out that they had submitted their resignation and no one had ever notified me. I would like to say that this is the only time that happened, but it’s not. This type of rapid turnover is seen most in the Customer Success team, but it happens at every level of the company. Quick question: Have you ever seen the entire DevOps team for a company simultaneously quit? What about half of the senior engineers? I have seen both. They’re not pretty. One more story: Someone once submitted an anonymous question to an all-company meeting, asking why their coworkers kept disappearing without any warning. The fact that someone felt the need to ask that question, and the fact that I had been wondering the same thing, says a lot. I wish I could post some of the words sent to me by coworkers as I wished them goodbye. They paint quite a picture. 3) HR. There is no formal HR department. Allow me to reiterate: There is no formal HR department. When I wanted to reach out about the way I was being treated by a coworker, I was directed to the People Team. I was rather hopeful, until I found out in short order that almost all of them had quit. They didn’t last a year. If you are having issues with a coworker, you need connections, and you need to hope those connections have the ears of the right people. Otherwise, you’re going to have a hard time. 4) Compensation. I was compensated VERY well… after my new boss let me know that I had been severely undercompensated for a significant amount of time, before raising my salary a frankly shocking amount. Yikes. 5) Diversity. At this time, there is a single diversity-focused group at the company; XSELL’s LadyGang. While the CEO absolutely empowers and supports them, the lack of any other such groups is quite striking. I originally had a section written here in which I discussed my own experiences of feeling intensely isolated due to my identity, but I have deleted it, since it could be used to easily identify me. I think that says quite a bit on its own. If I take a different job at some point in the future, I will return and edit this paragraph to be more candid. As others have alluded to, the response to the events surrounding BLM in 2020 was not good. It's not really my place to speak to that, so I will simply say that it left much to be desired, and refer the reader to other reviews written by those more directly impacted.
