Not worth the hair loss & sleepless nights - Anonymous employee Flexport Employee Review

2.0
24 Aug 2020
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Learn how to work in ambiguity - Free access to therapy - Room to teach yourself and form your own best practices - Learn to work with difficult personality types, navigate politics, and what buzzwords work for managing up - Very few systems in place to hold you accountable. Coasting is an option, and layoff perks are very nice. - Benefits and salaries are in line with similar sized companies in the Bay Area - If you know how to play the game, you can really grow your career. I've seen many men join the company with titles well above their experience level and continue to get promoted and rewarded. - Company is going to be okay until the end of 2020 because COVID has created some business opportunities. But most teams are so under resourced that by 2021 the burnout from working from home and structural ambiguity will easily slow this growth trend.

Cons

- CEO cares more about what the media thinks of him than what his employees think. He uses departments as a scapegoat during company calls to pin the blame for being "ROI negative" - Low diversity and inclusion is well reflected in the company culture. Women are often treated as secretaries and not frequently promoted. The CEO has 0 female direct reports. In the top 3 layers of the company, there are ~2x more women as EAs than there are women in leadership (and nearly all leaders are white or asian). - There is no structure. Operational teams are doing a great job to come up with structure but the execution is utter chaos. Reorgs and structural processes that have been introduced at the end of 2019 are still not in place. People have been asked to relocate to an area with a lower cost of living (and will likely receive a reduced salary) as a part of this reorg -- but they have not been given a timeline for when they are expected to relocate (or if the reorg and relocations are actually final). - There's a serious lack of efficiency because you're constantly reinventing the wheel and it's hard to have company-wide data insights when everyone is doing their jobs differently. Instead of creating process and more efficient workflows, Flexport went through a crazy hiring spree and now has spontaneous layoffs since they over-hired. - Everything is made up -- there's no transparency in where numbers are coming from. This is getting better, but I don't know if it will ever actually be better. I remember pulling numbers with a more senior team member for a board deck when I first started and later discovered that those numbers were outrageously inflated because of how poorly managed different databases and processes were. You may be asking yourself: This doesn't make sense, I keep reading articles that say Flexport is an amazing unicorn with revolutionary technology! This company has a press team that can make you excited about an expired bottle of mayonnaise. But once you're in, you realize the engine of this car is held together with zip-ties and no one knows what some of the zip ties are holding together anymore. I became tougher because of Flexport. I've never had my self confidence so shaken or had to deal with so much harassment in a work environment before.

avatar
Flexport Response
5y
Thank you for your feedback and candor--there are significant points in your review that do concern us that we are working hard to address. We doubled the size of our team in 2019 and this kind of growth is impossible to execute flawlessly. But we are committed to creating an inclusive culture where all Flexporters can grow, develop and work on the complex problems that we need to solve to make Global trade easy for everyone. I’d like to challenge a couple of statements. First that COVID has created some business opportunities - it’s our amazing existing customers who have created our continued growth opportunities. You are correct though COVID has given us an unprecedented challenge - we’re an operational company at our core and the switch to remote working has been challenging for all of our employees and we’re doing everything that we can to help them with COVID related challenges. Second, you mentioned that “operational teams are doing a great job to come up with structure” - execution around this is not flawless and we’re doing this as our business continues to grow, which makes it harder still - but the great talent that we have in operations and technology will land this and it will be the foundation for more efficient and less painful future growth. On your points on diversity, As part of our continued commitment, we have rolled a few initiatives and more are in progress--including global unconscious bias training for all people managers, adjusting our leadership development program to include a foundational part of DEIB (Diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging) principles, and the creation of a DEIB Learning program for all US Flexporters. We’ll take your feedback into consideration and I’m sorry that you did not enjoy your time at Flexport . If you want to talk about your personal experience and how we can make Flexport a better place to work for you, please feel free to reach out to your People Business Partner, and know my door is always open. You mention harassment in your review - I would encourage you to reach out to our independent complaint line or to me directly to share these specific concerns.

Explore other reviews about Flexport

5.0
28 Jan 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Challenging, fast-paced, balanced, global, exciting

Cons

There are a lot of problems to solve, so if you don't like solving problems, it's not for you. Bureaucracy exists but is not super established and is possible to break through.

5.0
21 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lots of really smart and nice people at the company. The culture has improved a lot recently. There's a good amount of room to develop and jump on things that you might not be exposed to in other companies.

Cons

The company moves a little too fast at times and maybe overlooks things that are working well and don't necessarily need to be changed for "efficiency" at the risk of doing things incorrectly. It can be hard to move up in some departments. work/life balance varies a lot by team.

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