GoDaddy

Good Benefits

On a systematic level, they are great to the employees.

Open to the LGBTQH Community. Open to equality for women in the workplace. Probably the most liberal company I have ever worked for.

Free / reduced cost lunches in almost every location. Great employee discounts.

I believe in many cases the upper management, like August and Blake, really do care.

No Career Longevity: The culture changed from people caring about their jobs and building a career at GoDaddy.com to people that come from Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc., to job hop and leave after 2 years. If you aren't an executive or a job hopper and you actually care about the company or your career at GoDaddy, you get stuck at the bottom rung.

Bad Raises: Have heard managers/directors say things like, "I don't give meaningful raises because everyone job hops anyway, so it's a waste to give people more money."

Bad Promotions: In the last year, I think everyone that has gotten a promotion has been a new hire; those people rise quickly. Long-term employees do not.

Bad Director Level Decision Making: Because most of the management is new, they don't actually know much about how GoDaddy works or about domains or the purchase path. And because their goal is to work there for a short period then job hop, they make decisions that try to get product to market ultra-quick and make themselves look good without knowing anything about how it works. It just makes life tougher for the customer, who ends up with a crazy user experience, and the developers for having to deal with chaos, having long-term necessary projects dropped in favor of something "sexy" right now.

Bad Developer Working Conditions: The company started to go agile and in the correct direction about 3 years ago, but have completely gone backward recently with a layoff of several Product Owners/Scrum Masters/QA, in favor of managers and directors micromanaging.

Internal Politics: Because of the new cultural phenomenon as the result of the above-mentioned problems, there is a ton of infighting over "moving cheese." I heard a director once try to get another director's project canceled because "the JVM had bad garbage collection," despite Java being the preferred framework at GoDaddy. At times, working here is just humorous.

If you aren't in the "Good Clique," you're not going to make it there. It's more about who you know than how you do your job, which is a newer thing.

Constant Reorgs: Because people at the top leave so frequently, I have stopped bothering to learn the names of people at the top. If you go more than a month without a re-org affecting your reporting chain or how you communicate with another group, it is a miracle.

Despite all of this, it's possible to thrive here at GoDaddy. If you would fit in at Microsoft, but are willing to work for less, maybe because you are not as good, then you are an ideal developer for GoDaddy.

Stop implicitly trusting almost all of the new (within the last 0-3 years) directors and managers. Require that they meet some metrics or earn the trust. Find a good way to evaluate managers/directors' competency. They may be making their direct reports miserable or causing major problems, and the direct reports have zero recourse.