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Brooks Running Reviews
- 5 0%
- 4 0%
- 3 100%
- 2 0%
- 1 0%
Ratings by Category
- 1.0 Career Growth
- 5.0 Work - Life Balance
- 3.0 Compensation / Benefits
- 5.0 Company Culture
- 2.0 Management
“Better suited to mid-senior level folks, especially if you have kids.”
Pros- Company culture is probably one of the best you'll ever find.
- Work/life balance is exceptional.
- Five weeks of PTO (use it or lose it so it doesn't accrue and you can't cash it out if you quit).
- Taking time out of your day to go on a run or workout is encouraged/accepted.
- Awesome colleagues.
- Similar to the point above, my manager is actually awesome! I wish I could take him with me to the next job/company I find. He's incredibly supportive and advocates for me when I need it! By far the best manager I've ever had.
- The people I see happiest at this company are folks with kids as they have great work/life balance.
- Interview process is the least stressful. No white boarding.
Cons- You will be underpaid as the trade-off is work/life balance (although I'd argue that work/life balance doesn't pay the bills). Along those lines, don't expect a great compensation package in comparison to other tech roles at other companies in the area, because it's not a "tech" company. Your bonus is dependent on the EBITA of the business so it's not a guarantee. I know of a couple folks who took salary decreases when coming to Brooks but the trade off of work/life balance was worth it to them. Again, many of these people have children. Something to consider...
- There are no performance reviews. There are these things called Sprints like the running term (yup, super confusing for those who work in software with Agile), that occur every quarter, where they are employee lead to talk about your goals that relate to your career or the business. These sprints carry no weight into whether you receive a promotion or not. So what is the point if it's not going to be recognized or validated, on a company level, for achieving them!?
- Little to no growth opportunities. The company tends to hire externally rather than training/promoting from within. I rarely see promotions. There was a developer on my team who has been working here for 5 years with high regards to his work and had not once received a promotion. He finally received a promotion going into his 6th year at Brooks. Absurd.
- No job ladders/families. It's not clear what is needed to move into other roles because these roles are not formalized and communicated to teams. In addition, there are roles that should exist, like TPMs to manage projects but they don't. We own a tech product so let's act like it and hire roles that are required to manage them.
- Each department acts like they are their own little start-up which makes cross team work an absolute nightmare because there are no defined processes in place. Up until a few months ago, various departments were using different instant messaging platforms, i.e. Skype, Slack, Teams, etc. The company now has over 1,000 employees globally but the don't sure don't act like it sometimes.
- Don't even get me started on the IT team. You DO NOT have admin access on your computer. Yes, let me repeat that. As a developer of software, you DO NOT have admin access. This is one of the most cockamamie aspects of being a developer at Brooks. Trying to update a globally installed program...submit a ticket to IT. Trying to update an app installed in your Applications directory...submit a ticket to IT. Trying to install a new dev tool...submit a ticket to IT. Trying to spin up your VM so you can have admin access but it's no longer working...submit a ticket to IT. The Digital Products team has pushed for IT to adhere to best practices on this but they refuse to acknowledge it.
- Brooks LOVES to hire third party vendors to do work that the development team is clearly capable of doing. Leadership continually does this even though our team has expressed wanting to work directly with these projects. There is a continuous pattern of how these third party vendors come in, add to our code base but then depart the project with incomplete work and poor documentation. It is very rare to work on a project from scratch to completion because this work is outsourced to third party vendors. We are also very limited in our abilities sometimes because of the CMSs we use(Salesforce and Sitecore). You will not be using most modern frameworks or build tools.
- Brooks has outgrown their CMS and has continually failed to acknowledge its limitations. Even the integration within our CMS for shipping and logistics is not longer working for us. This would be a great opportunity to reflect on the long term implications of continuing to use our existing stack.
- Brooks is an independent subsidy of Berkshire Hathaway, which may sound great as they have lots of cash in the bank ,but they are cheap asf around some things.
- Leadership doesn't understand the technical repercussions of the decisions they make because there is no technical leadership, there is no CTO. Leadership, hire up than my manager, doesn't really listen to our team's grievances or suggestions. TinyPulse is great and all but if you're not implementing feedback, then again, what is the point?
- If you love technical debt, then you will LOVE working here. There is a mountain of tech debt that continues to grow because of the bullet point above. Leadership does not understand tech. Even though we have senior and lead devs who explain these topics/consequences, leadership does not listen because it doesn't have an instant revenue effect.
