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Faithlife

Now known as Logos

Engaged Employer

From HOAGIES to PROFIT - Anonymous employee Faithlife Employee Review

1.0
Mar 19, 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Logos Bible Software is truly amazing and significantly contributes to the mission of the Church. - Christmas parties and other social events for employees - Awesome, hardworking employees - Remote work option - Free soda on site

Cons

Faithlife, now rebranded as Logos, appears to be trying to escape the onslaught of numerous negative reviews associated with the former brand. Instead of addressing their numerous errors, they seem intent in doubling-down on them. Despite its 30+ year history, it seems like there are departments that are still allowed to operate with the disarray reminiscent of a fledgling startup, lacking clear structure and direction. Their culture seems to favor an arrogant, hustle-at-all-costs ethos, with little regard for healthy work-life balance and respectful workplace dynamics. Because of the company's cost-cutting frenzy, workloads are overwhelmingly heavy, particularly with Foreign Languages, where managers, especially those of emerging lines of business, are expected to fulfill the responsibilities of several people. Every year, they're expected to hit higher revenue targets with even less money to work with, and somehow, also supposed to come up with more plans, more OKRs, more granular reports, and a ton of busywork so that others can take the credit. It's a reenactment of the Exodus 5:13 scenario: more bricks, less straw. The expectation to increasingly deliver while lacking the necessary support has created an irrational and frustrating situation. This environment is reinforced by regular meetings which often amount to no more than Performance measuring contests which, needless to say, fail to foster genuine team engagement. When egregiously damaging decisions are made, leaders often evade direct responsibility. Instead, they hide behind convoluted jargon and delegate to others the dirty work of enforcing such decisions, thus sidestepping direct accountability. When employees seek clarity through specific questions, they are either lulled into a false sense of security or kept waiting for solutions that prove to be perpetually elusive and indefinitely postponed. Leadership at the company tends to dismiss input from subject matter experts and fails to adequately communicate vital information. This disregard extends to contractors who, despite playing crucial roles, are treated as third-rate workers in the company. They face delayed payments, restricted access to information, exclusion from company benefits and social events, lack of safety net or insurance, and a pervasive sense of impending termination. Faithlife's contractors have the worst of both worlds: employee responsibilities and contractor benefits (i.e., zero). No recourse to HR. Are these practices in compliance with federal and state regulations? In our grossly-mismanaged department, company culture is notably absent. The typical informal and social online gatherings common in other organizations are conspicuously missing here. To illustrate, my birthdays have slipped by unnoticed for several consecutive years. On the most recent occasion, instead of a celebration of another year of life, there was a meeting convened to inform contractors of a significant policy shift: the company would no longer provide the tools essential for their work, leaving them to fend for themselves in procuring necessary software and hardware. Product managers, later renamed "business line owners," are overburdened, being expected to handle a broad spectrum of responsibilities, from sales and marketing to customer service and product strategy, often without sufficient resources or support, while pressured to make high-impact decisions in a short amount of time. As stressful as this is, the recent abrupt terminations of numerous employees, coupled with an alarmingly high turnover rate of talented individuals, alongside below-industry-standard pay and drastically reduced budgets, and the company's mishandling of basic obligations make the work experience nothing short of brutally demoralizing. The refusal of the leadership to acknowledge and rectify mistakes, coupled with a culture that seems to value self-promotion over humility, will lead to its inevitable demise unless senior leadership owns these grave mistakes and reverses course immediately. With the incoming CEO, they have an extraordinary opportunity to do so. The reviews here tell the same story: Faithlife, now known as Logos, is not what it used to be. At the end of the day, it's painfully obvious that their only concern is the bottom line, and that, despite the fact that they're in the business of selling Christian products, genuine Christian ethics are conspicuously absent.

Explore other reviews about Faithlife

5.0
May 16, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Powerful and tangible mission connected throughout the organization. Exciting growth opportunities across the business. Vision to develop as a modern technology company. New and experienced executive team leading change.

Cons

Modernizing all functions takes adjustment.

2
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Faithlife Response
2y
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about your experience! We're glad to hear you value our mission and are excited about growth opportunities across the businesses. We’re committed to developing as a high-tech company and are fortunate to have a dedicated executive team leading the way. Your feedback is valuable as we continue to drive positive change across the organization. We're here to support you and work to create an even better employee experience.
3.0
Feb 3, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

For a long time Faithlife was the Christian software company, and there are tons of incredibly skilled software engineers, QA, product people there, and literally everyone I interacted with was awesome. Faithlife's founder and initial CEO was a Microsoft Software Engineer and he created a culture that values technical excellence and growth greatly. Technical debt was rarely suffered for long and engineers were afforded great leeway (and expected) to improve and modernize applications and tooling. Note that I don't know if the above has changed. Team leads are always open to engineers taking the lead on new feature development and developing leadership experience. Moving between teams is a regular occurrence and the relationship between development teams are often extremely good and team coordination and cooperation is generally really good. Team leads are well trained and the ones I had experience with were great at leading theie teams both technically and from a more leadership oriented approach.

Cons

The elephant in the room: the 2022 layoffs were very rough and brought a lot of management and leadership issues to everyone's attention. Faithlife has always been a mission driven organization but it isn't clear that the mission is embraced by the ownership of the company as it is by the rank and file. There is tension between it's stated mission and it's profit driven nature, and how that factors into the decisions the company makes. The departure of the founder/CEO Bob Pritchett brought with it a lot of cultural changes and uncertainties (and layoffs) and made it feel like that tension was leaning a lot more in favor of profit goals over mission. The above is purely my observations derived from my own feelings. If you're not a Christian of some flavor you will likely be uncomfortable working hear given the company's mission; though ironically I had fewer conversations about faith here than anywhere else I have ever worked. There was definitely a pressure to try to make the company more friendly to non-believers but it kind of made it weird for those who were (maybe an over correction). On-call rotations were pretty demanding for some teams with engineers being on call one week a month or even more frequently, and being responsible for services and applications they didn't touch as part of their day to day responsibilities. Likewise given the nature of the software being on call often meant being woken up at odd hours on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday and being unable to attend your own church services. Being a remote employee was actually a better experience prior to Covid rather than after. A lot of social activities were remote friendly pre-covid (and handled well) while post covid many simply stopped happening altogether. Faithlife rewards being broadly capable as an engineer over being really experienced and deeply knowledgeable in a particular area. Not necessarily a con, but still a point to mention. It can be really hard to stand out and get promoted to a higher tier Engineer role. Faithlife's expectations for the software development roles are really, really high, and given that there are so many extremely skilled engineers it can be tough to move up. Pay and benefits aren't really competitive with the sheer skills and responsibilities expected for the role levels.

9
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