GoDaddy

Great benefits, flexible hours, fun work culture.

A glorified call center. They pushed for metrics that changed often and rewarded competitiveness, which sometimes created a toxic environment. In the past few years, more and more of the design services have been slowly outsourced, and the focus shifted away from quality, creativity, and originality to try and meet the demand. By the time they shut down the entire US-based design services (at least 100 people were laid off, me included), employee turnover was crazy high, mainly from low-quality training provided. Agents with no design experience were hired and thrown onto the floor, called "web design specialists," and expected to be able to properly support customers without ever seeing how a website is built. Templates and automation took over the entire operation.

Honestly, working for GoDaddy was great, but frustrating. Raising your concerns to management was useless. Even if your management was receptive, higher-ups would shut down any attempt at improving internal processes simply for not understanding what the actual jobs entail. It's a classic: externally hired managers who had no experience in the field, supervising without fully understanding what their team went through on a daily basis, therefore completely unable to provide proper guidance.

I must say, I am speaking solely about the design department, because the sales/hosting experience I had before moving to design was completely different, with knowledgeable managers and team leads that had done the job themselves and could actually answer questions. It's almost as if the design services were not part of GoDaddy and ran independently. They didn't even provide the same onboarding as the rest of the company, leaving external hires completely lost and clueless as to what GoDaddy could actually offer to the customers they were talking to on the phone.

About the actual design part... Well, if you mean "forget about coding and use these page builder templates with this vendor-provided copy on WordPress," it's easy!

Spend a few days every quarter trying to do what your employees do every day.