Short version: the highest level of micromanagement at any company.
Well, the company has gone through three CEOs in as many years. That says a lot about how the company operates.
Along with those changes, and specific to the Support organization, the top-down leadership of OpenTable Support, almost entirely white middle-aged men, is cold, callous, ineffectual, divisive, and worst of all phony.
That's probably the most insidious thing that I could advise you about. Like a lot of tech companies OpenTable can roll out a great red carpet: they have sodas/coffee, there's a lounge with video games, they're spending a lot of money during and just before Covid hit to build out a new office. Not dissimilar from an abusive parent who attempts to buy your love.
The senior leadership (VP, Directors, Managers) can make small inoffensive gestures to make the people feel well taken care of, or feel heard, in shortsighted unimportant ways. The management team will talk at length about this ineffable, indescribable "*magic* that happens when we're all in a room together" as an excuse to bring people back into offices as soon as localities allow, totally disrespecting the fact that the Support organization's low-level rooms aren't actually given any agency to positively affect a single thing. That magic might exist in engineering rooms, or product management rooms. It doesn't exist at OpenTable in Support rooms. We just follow a script.
OpenTable Support follows a "coaching" system. However a more accurate name for it would be a micromanagement system. Higher up employees on the team like the Senior CSRs and Supervisors might try to convince you that they welcome creativity, however any creativity that you're allowed is under such tight scrutiny, and requiring such a high level of conformity that to call it creativity is nonsense. Let's be explicit about what this "coaching" system is, particularly as it is the biggest determination into promotions, advancement, and raises. A person on a QA team randomly selects a single case that you worked in a week, grade it for conformity to their system, and then report that single case per week to your manager so they can coach you on what you did wrong. Many of these categories are highly subjective and very little recognition is paid toward what you did right. If you get a single thing wrong within a category the entire category is marked as not having been met.
At the end of the year virtually your entire raise is based on conformity to this system. 52 randomly selected cases. How many cases you worked doesn't really matter. CSAT scores, creative problem solving, deep dives into highly sensitive or more time consuming cases, all that has no bearing. Just conformity to their system. The Pillars of Excellence.
I strongly advise against you taking a position at OpenTable's Support team unless it's just a brief stopover on your way to a bigger and better things.
