passionate but unprofessional management - Anonymous employee Periscopic Employee Review

3.0
8 May 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people are smart, passionate, creative. Everyone means well. The pay is not competitive if you compare to a typical tech company but they aren't one. The benefits are pretty good.

Cons

A lot of the people working here are relatively inexperienced in what they do. This isn't necessarily bad, but this means management should be prepared to support. The project managers are typically ready to do this but sometimes can't. The cofounders have experience with design and tech but are inconsistent in their approach to dealing with people. They can be understanding and kind but also temperamental and unprofessional. Time seems to be managed poorly. Turnover rate is high.

Explore other reviews about Periscopic

5.0
23 Jan 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- great environment - talented, thoughtful leadership - client service work with a mission - teams are generally dedicated to one or two projects at a time - rare opportunity to work on data visualization problems full-time

Cons

- selectivity around clients and projects means work can be slow at times

2.0
22 Sept 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Do Good with Data must be the best tagline of all time. The idea that data visualization can be crafted as a social good rather than a corporate metric is way overdue. More companies need to do this. Employees are smart, creative, cooperative, and nice.

Cons

Management is dysfunctional and disorganized. Employees are given conflicting directions and goals are changed without warning. The 'Do Good With Data' is just the shiny veneer - employees are as likely to be grinding away at some corporate visualization drudgery as they are to be saving the polar bears. My personal experience as a designer was one of constant frustration. I was kept completely siloed from the customer, consistently told that the customer liked my work, then told that it wasn't good enough or just plain wrong. My supervisor alternated between telling me to design my way and telling me to design according to the process of the employee i was replacing. My task was to design a user interface for a visualization the DataVis team hadn't even started on yet, and when i suggested it would be easier to make a good design if i knew what i was designing for, i was treated as if i was intentionally being uncooperative. Ultimately, i was fired without warning (my boss didn't even do it themselves, but instead had the other partner handle it), though the final design of the product is based entirely on my 'unsatisfactory' work. I know that the company went through at least two more designers in the 18 months after i left, which suggests some sort of systemic problem in the UI department.

4
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