OpenTable Engineer reviews

Are you an engineer? Are you looking to use your talents to build great products, and receive recognition and reward for your hard work? Then you'd better look elsewhere. Go to Google, Facebook, or countless other technology companies which value their engineers. These are fundamentally technology driven companies, OpenTable is a sales/marketing driven organization. Engineers are simply cogs in the wheel, and are easily replaceable in the eyes of management. They just don't do performance-based compensation at all. Sure, management has received about $20 million each in stock option based compensation, but the rules are different for everyone else within the company. Even for the engineers who actually create the product that is making management so extraordinarily wealthy. There is no individual recognition whatsoever, unless you make a mistake which costs the company money. Then they will hold an all hands meeting to place blame on the engineer who made the mistake. If you create a product which generates millions in revenue, not a word is said. There is no bonus structure at all. Work as hard as you possibly can, still no bonus. There is absolutely no incentive at all for hard work within this organization. You work your butt off and management gets rich, that's pretty much how it works around here. There is no opportunity to advance within the Engineering department either. All the team leads have been there 6+ years and aren't going anywhere. Promotions and even recognition are not lacking in any other department within the company, but they are an extreme rarity within Engineering. I want to reiterate to any talented engineers out there -- if you want to see your talents appreciated and rewarded, you are better off looking elsewhere.

Very unhealthy corporate culture. Senior management recently awarded themselves a second round of stock options equivalent to five times (500%) the industry standard for executive stock option compensation for 2010. They then used those same 'industry standards' to cap all employee salary increases to 3% or less for the year. They then cashed out nearly all of those options they had just awarded themselves. They are almost all completely divested of the company at this point. One wonders if this is simply a strategy to get yet another options award to keep management incentivised. There is little to no formal recognition of engineers who create the products that are making these managers into multi-millionaires. There is an immense amount of anger in Engineering towards management, which may explain why we haven't seen the VP of Engineering in nearly six months.