IPSY reviews

- Leadership team is extremely poor quality both tech leadership as well as the company leadership. Priorities change often. Every year company has a new strategy and more often than not, the company leadership keeps on talking about strategy with no substance. There are orgs which have frequent re-orgs and it disrupts employee's everyday life. Leadership team does not even recognize this as an issue. Basically company runs as a dictatorial regime, where CEO pulls strings and the whole company executes against his plans. Very top-down culture and usually feedback given to senior management is ignored. - Compensation: IPSY's compensation is subpar compared to similar bay area tech companies. (forget top tech companies like FB, Google, etc.) They generally pay below market 20%. No performance multipliers applied to bonus although promised during offer. Very poor stock based compensation. Initial grants are very poor, much less than what FAANG could offer. - Benefits: Benefits are okay compared to beauty firms but not fair compared to tech firms. No 401k match, No wellness reimbursement, No phone reimbursement despite on-call rotations, Poor office equipments (no ergonomics), No lunch, dinner and the list goes on. Was promised in 2018 and 2019 cultural survey that they would introduce 401k match however it is not here yet. Very poor HR leadership imo. - Poor Hiring: IPSY seems to only hire new grads in engineering. Since their compensation structure is outdated, eng teams struggle a lot in finding senior talent. It is not hard to find teams within ipsy which are very junior with one or zero senior level talent. - Lack of engineering culture: If you're someone from big tech firm, there is a strong emphasis on the eng culture and best practices. IPSY has no engineering culture. There are frequent outages and teams have no sense of accountability. Engineers are not encouraged to share their work widely and often good work is not recognized. Engineering leadership needs drastic change and there is an urgent need to bring in people who have actual experience running large engineering orgs. Because of these issues, there is a very high turnover in engineering org and all the good engineers are either leaving or have already left.

- weak company management, decisions change quite often and unpredictably. feels like they are not thought throughly. - the management gathers everyone and talks about themselves/praises themselves and make the company applaud them pretty often. feels a little narcissist on their side :) - the way the company is managed is very inefficient. for example there is a company wide 30 minutes meeting every monday which is an information overflow for everybody (hence waste of time). - packed office, your desk is next to someone else's desk and there is there is another rack of desks right behind you, often times it becomes too noisy to work. there is not any ergonomics whatsoever. - most of the engineers are foreign. probably because of that work environment feels very anti-social. no happy hours, no hanging outs outside of work. - company has hard time recruiting new software engineers. be ready for a lot of interviews. probably because of this H1B holder ratio is very high in the company. - from the engineering perspective, engineering management is a mess. I've seen resources being allocated to unnecessary framework changes and in-house implementations of things such as routers and deployment systems. On the other hand there are other pushing features with deadlines that people rush to complete. Often times team responsibilities change etc. Seems like a waste of resource allocation when there is both.