Vimeo

• Good benefits • Unlimited snacks • Fun people to work with

• no product vision • multiple restructures/reorgs • little room for career growth • spur-of-the-moment mass firings • no product goal communication beyond upper-level management

Note that nearly every person in the "What it's like to work at Vimeo" video has quit.

Vimeo used to be a wonderful organization to be a part of. That's what you used to be: a part of it, not an individual "working there". The product was (and is, for now) amazing. The people were incredible. You could not have had a more talented and dedicated group of individuals working to create a product the users loved – all of whom were avid users of said product.

Unfortunately, in recent years Vimeo has aggressively gone downhill. The parent company, IAC, managed to keep their hands out of the cookie jar for a long time. Once involved, almost all of the things that make any product great fell by the wayside:

• Product vision disappeared. Employees are no longer informed of the long-term goals that upper management wants to achieve. When goals/projects are communicated, they are more often than not canceled or overhauled multiple times in the span of the project's life. Features are worked on until management decides on a new direction, scrapping all of the existing work.

• Lacking competent management staff. Most upper-level employees are not users of the product and thus have little understanding of what makes it great. Their business goals are detached from product integrity or value, simply focused on short-term number and money gains. There is also little to no communication down to other employees about company changes until there are large, sweeping updates announced in all-company meetings – aka mass firings with jumbled explanations.

• Clear roadmaps/product goals. Long-term and short-term product goals are always changing. Many projects are worked on for months at a time and completely canceled at the drop of a hat. New features are often overhauled multiple times with little reason or direction for each round of change. Product updates are no longer justified/reasoned by being better for the user – instead, they are presented as viable reasons to make subscription products more robust and those viable for price increases.

• Dedication to product and users. Very sad to say that Vimeo's dedication to the users disappeared a long time ago. A beautiful organization once made up of creatives, videographers, and many people passionate, proud, and active in the Vimeo Universe, is now a group of business people, marketers, and drones executing on their day-to-day functions to hit corporate goals.

I am a proud user of Vimeo and wish I still worked there. I left by choice. Vimeo is no longer the magical ecosphere of sharing, learning, and unified devotion to creating a magnificent and remarkable product for the people that value it the most. Very sad to see the state it has become.