Zello Reviews

There is a group of people at this company who have never worked anywhere else and have worked here for a VERY long time. Couple that with a leadership team that is very inexperienced and you end up with a culture that preaches excellence but ends up with mostly mediocrity and entropy. All of the leaders went through leadership training to learn how to lead if that helps add color. The CEO is extremely introverted and isn't what you would call an inspiring coach for the team. If you go through LinkedIn you will notice that most Zello veterans have little outside connections to the Austin / SF / East Coast software scene. This is telling of their experience and exposure to AAA software companies and software playbooks. If you came from an mature and capable engineering organization you are going to have an allergic reaction to the quality of the code, infrastructure, tooling, and processes you are used to. Jira was recently introduced and implemented in a very odd way. The majority of the code base is a giant mudball written by "Staff" engineers who have severe title inflation. A lot of features were born out of hackathons and are not ready for production but were released anyway. You will not find good architectural design, test coverage, observability, cost attribution, etc. It's institutional knowledge all the way down with key engineers who badly wired the house but know how to keep the lights on. With that said, they have introduced some interesting WebRTC/networking technology that scales very well. The problem is that it's backed by layers and layers of mono repos, leaky abstractions and way to many config flags. There is a web app, Android app, IOS app, Electron app, and even a Windows app. Hugh maintenance liability. The sign of any good software is how easy it is to change and this software isn't easy to change. Super brittle. Grown up challenges surrounding tech debt, security incidents, and outages are all starting to rear their ugly head. The term P1 or PagerDuty will be met with blank stares. If you try the software, you quickly notice how clunky the UX is and how many bugs exist on the edges. This is lost on the veterans who think the software is world class. I attribute this to pride, vanity and naivete. This would be a great place for a whip smart set of engineers to come in and make a big impact. The problem is a) no one likes being told their baby is ugly b) the culture does not reward truth tellers, they reward "go along to get along" people and c) the CTO and CEO do not have the personality and assertiveness to drive the change and team that is needed. Everyone is really nice. The product itself solves a key problem. But 12 years of cruft and anti-patterns with a culture that is extremely change averse and naive to modern ways of building software leads me to daily frustration. I have no opportunity to expand my skill set and am frequently met with roadblocks that have me questioning my role here. The leadership team is not inspiring or motivating. That may not be important to some people who just want to go heads down and be told what to do. I like it some days but this place will hold back my growth and that's a tough place to be if you are ambitious and like to learn. If you want to lay low and have a good quality of life, Zello may be a good fit for you. If you want to level up and learn from a group of strong inspirational leaders and 10x engineers, this isn't where you want to be. Equity is far smaller than you would expect for a Series A company. I am assuming the veterans want to get paid and the decision was made to keep equity tight. No refreshes so far. Zello has a set of well intentioned people, but by and large, most of them are inexperienced and are examples of the Peter Principle in action.

This review is based on my personal experience, so you might want to take it with a grain of salt. I was hesitant to write one at all – because of the high-schooler gossip that goes on, I know it will be obvious who wrote this. However, I can’t stay silent about just how objectively poorly I was treated by this company. They will tell you that people who are “self-starters and highly motivated” will excel at this company. I came in not long after graduating and I have the exact temperament to match what they were looking for. For over a year of working at Zello, I was a superstar. I was consistently praised across all levels of leadership, and I gained a reputation for being a dependable and knowledgeable colleague. People across departments wanted me on their projects. I felt valued and rewarded for my hard work. That all changed when the decision was made to downsize the customer-facing team from around 15-20 people to 5. They combined multiple roles into one without ANY attempt at transparency about what these roles would actually be doing – or increased compensation. I tried to roll with the punches, but I also repeatedly raised my concerns about the increased workload and lack of transparency leading to burnout. These concerns were never listened to, only invalidated and forgotten about. I stopped getting positive attention or praise, and the conversation about compensation was continually pushed back. Once a replacement had been found (in the form of a 22-year-old new grad who wouldn’t “complain”), I was “laid off” without any sort of real explanation. They also loved talking about bringing in “fresh talent” (people with no experience) who could be sculpted to do things “the Zello way”, which just sounds like corporate grooming to me, especially since my attempts to voice concerns and set boundaries within the workplace earned me the pink slip. Apparently, my manager had tried to advocate for me to transition into a new role instead of being let go, but it was shot down from the top. I know this because, again, the culture is very gossipy. I attribute this at least partially to the fact that negative feedback is only ever met with consequences to the employee raising their voice. There are way too many secret trash-talking groups for a company this size, but they exist because employees feel like it’s their only avenue to air their grievances without backlash. Don’t join this company unless: - You are ok with never setting boundaries in the workplace, or having them pushed against - You understand that while work-life balance is possible to achieve at Zello, it is frowned upon and seen as less important than doing your “part” to help the company succeed - You are ok with the fact that there is very little onboarding, no action plan to address this, and if you get it wrong then it’s on you - You are ok with a total lack of stability in terms of your responsibilities - new things will be added to your plate without any conversation around whether or not you can take them on - You are ok with joining a company where 85% of people in non-product or development roles are eventually let go instead of leaving on their own terms, even those who have the right disposition and make impactful contributions to the company - You are ok with being valued differently if you choose to work remotely as opposed to coming into the office - You are ok with constantly moving goalposts and increasing your OKR’s mid-quarter if you do actually manage to meet them