Amazing People, Dark Future - Anonymous employee OBMedia Employee Review

Absolutely fantastic company to work for. I’ve worked at a number of different jobs and this one offers by far the best work life balance and fulfilling work. Management is very open to change and as an engineer I feel I can make a direct difference to both revenue in the company and engineering process. OBMedia truly cares about its employees and offers great benefits and lots of PTO. The only people who don’t succeed here are mostly lacking in communication skills but a since this is a fully remote company that is par for the course.

Only con is that the company is in the advertising space which isn’t the most interesting work compared to other engineering jobs. However we deal with quite a large scale (millions of clicks per day) so the engineering problems to solve maintain their interest.

The ICs were genuinely anomalously sharp and good at their work. Baseline, they're significantly competent and exercise their agency well, and more than that, they try to set each other up for success. Among the ICs, people try to speak to the "why" of what we're doing. The pay was also really really good, although near the end there was a tendency to try to pay according to "industry comp ranges" as opposed to actual value to the company - which is honestly a crazy thing to do at a small search arbitrage company.

Senior management - I hesitate to say leadership - has no real strategic plan. The CEO just doesn't seem to add any value when present - at least none obvious to mere mortals - and for a while we had two CTOs? Management just below C-suite kept promising strategy and declaring priorities that were plainly not grounded in reality, and then walking it back after not meaningfully trying. ICs were kept in the dark to figure themselves out. The relationship with the parent holding company (Enero) was bizarre, but internal management was also bizarre. There was some kind of political fight in 2023 where the CEO ousted the CDO? And then the good senior managers quietly left? Senior management decisions after that were...odd, to say the least.