Oddball Reviews

I was a long-time employee of Oddball having started when there were around 40 employees. I can genuinely say that for several years I really enjoyed working at Oddball. The culture and people were fantastic, the work was engaging, there was good flexibility to meet the needs of my family, etc. My love for the company ran so deep I was willing to do anything they asked. I even ended my parental leave for my newborn early in order to come back and help because the company needed me. Unfortunately, over the last year I witnessed a dramatic shift in the culture at Oddball and the way they treat their biggest asset, their people. They seemed to openly ignore requests for growth and additional leadership opportunities, and they flouted opportunities to consider hiring from within for key roles (this extended far beyond me to others who had been with the company even longer than I had). Instead, they turned to “flashy” hires, folks who were former Silicon Valley employees and IT executives. It did not matter that some of these individuals had zero experience with federal contracts, nor did they care that some of these individuals didn’t have the technical knowledge to do the job. I believe one relatively recent hire was using ChatGTP to generate much of their work. Some of these new hires were outwardly hostile to others who dared to ask questions or suggest alternatives regardless of the legitimacy of those questions or suggestions. Given my time at the company and my long history with the espoused culture of the company I felt it was my duty to speak up about how this was impacting the team and ultimately the work product. I felt driven to do this by my ongoing belief in what Oddball represented as an employer and company. After much discussion and investigation (which included several coworkers who told me they expressed the same or similar concerns) I and my coworkers were essentially told to sit down, shut up, do our jobs, and follow orders. I have a young family to support so that is what I did. Then one day I came to work and logged into a regular supervision with my boss to be met by the COO and Director of HR who informed me that my services were no longer needed within the company as there was a lack of work. I attempted to negotiate a demotion to a lower-level role or some amount of severance but was told my employment would end effective that day. Within a day they had taken someone else from within the company and filled my former role. Within a week they posted a job for hire that I could easily have demoted into (as I offered to do). I was not given any sympathy for the financial blow this dealt to my family, nor did anyone care enough to provide me with any insight into how I went from an employee in good standing (no PIP or other adverse action to put me on notice) to unemployment in a matter of seconds. I cannot adequately express how devastating this was to me. I had invested my heart and soul into this company because I truly believed they were different from other companies and valued people and humanity. I sacrificed time with my newborn baby and spouse because my dedication ran so deep. It is clear to me that the Oddball so many people describe in older reviews on this page no longer exists. They do not value people. Each employee is just a number in terms of how much money they can make the company under federal contracts.

With government clients comes the lack of inertia for moving forward. There are times when it takes several weeks to just get to a point where you can get a denial for a change and have to start over. The engineers you're working with range from skilled to not skilled and in between. Patchwork between multiple vendors working on a single service makes it difficult to get things done. Being a government contract less than skilled engineers tend to last much longer and get promoted. The less you know the more likely you are to be a senior engineer. You are not going to be working on anything very sexy or new in this position. Pay is average, no opportunity to get raises or promotions as this is all government contract and set in advance. No moving up or laterally between projects. Pigeon holed to where you first start. Hard to get answers to spending questions from Oddball finance group. Will usually take several emails to finally get attention for simplest questions. Too many meetings. Just too many meetings. Quarterly reviews will ping you for something you did months before and no one mentioned it at the time. Then keep mentioning it again and again in later reviews. The one little nothing is still getting brought up many months later. You have to provide you're own work equipment. You have some opportunity to pay for it via the spending account.