Pros
If you suffer through it for a year, you get a new old stock 24” D-Series TV that they couldn’t sell. It’s their lowest quality model and since it’s NOS, you might end up with one that’s basically a paperweight that uses electricity. But you might get a newer model, and it’s useful as a monitor or a gift to someone you don’t like but need to pretend to be nice to. Think, pushy mother-in-law.
Cons
There’s no good place to start; VIZIO is a tire fire someone threw in a trash bin fire. Every part is awful - save a few miracle people whose sense of loyalty to (and probably guilt around) the people there keep them from leaving - and absolutely everything you read here on Glassdoor is true. The CEO is the sort of multimillionaire who brags about how he bought multiple houses across the US to his employees thanks to their hard work (wish this was a joke). He’s also the kind of multimillionaire who thinks he knows what his lower-income middle America Walmart purchasers want so he demands dumb features be made, which is how consumers got mediocre TVs with the ability to send photos to other VIZIO owners. After all, why would you want a TV that doesn’t crash if you could have a photo you never wanted sent to you. There’s no vision; they don’t understand that speak at any level, and don’t have the chops to keep the company united and focused on a meaningful goal. The closest they have to is their twice a week leadership calls. They’re nearly identical meetings with no real agenda except 60-90+ mins of either explaining why you’re doing a phenomenal job (you swear), or why other teams are somehow responsible for your failures (you swear). The COO is the kind of person who not only makes reviews about how good his company is on Glassdoor, but he apparently also stops his 40+ person meeting because one attendee who he wants to yell at isn’t on, calls him on the phone with the meeting not on mute, and yells at him until he gets on the conference call (then continues to yell at him) - yes, everyone talks so we all heard about that. He’s the type that demands to know why people aren’t buying TVs in the middle of a recession. The very recession they’re using as blame for giving us middling raises (if any). He’ll walk around an office at 8:31 am and take camera phone pictures of empty desks and send them to your boss. While it’s fair to say the CEO and COO know (knew?) how to ship hardware, VIZIO doesn’t make much on their actual TVs so they need good software to make ad revenue, and neither know how to do software. At all. Speaking of software, they pit their engineering organizations against each other with the bait of being CTO dangled in front of them (they haven’t been able to hire an external CTO). All engineering leadership must dance for the CEO/COO, and have a lot of interdependent stuff, so they constantly are forced to throw one another under the bus constantly. The CFO and CRO are probably the closest to adults in the room, but can’t change the toxicity at all because going against their the CEO or COO is a death wish. How toxic is it? The HR function used to live under legal for starters (a red flag of all red flags), HR leaders quit, HR got moved to the CFO, they backfilled about a year ago and that basically lasted the one year before everyone was “spending more time with their family”. The employee pulse surveys were constantly rewritten in fear of the CEO/COO, because they don’t want to hear that people are upset with their “VIZIO family”. It’s the kind of “family” where all the black employees had to petition for MLK day off (DEI is a joke here), or how it took executives getting pregnant to get them to consider paid parental leave. Below the C-suite, the rest of leadership is bougie Game of Thrones. Everything you’ve read is real - some execs are great at brown-nosing the CEO/COO, and those are the ones that survive. They build their little empires and instead of building real value for the business, they play politics to kick out people they view as threats. This means the actual good leaders churn regularly. No one at that layer actually trusts the others, will speak incredibly poorly of one another behind the other’s back, but pretend to be besties because they all know where one another’s bodies are buried and things could turn quickly if they didn’t at least pretend. As you’d guess, that team learned how to lead from the C-suite, so all that same toxicity applies. For example, the entire platform leadership team knows the ads org is a churn and burn factory, but they don’t care if they don’t know how to build culture and retain (culture is an ice machine in NYC), because they all believe there are a hundred other people out there jumping at the chance to take a role there to replace the bodies they go through. That mentality is the real “VIZIO Family”. You, as an employee, should be grateful that you have the chance to be treated like a serf, because there are people just banging down the doors to take your spot. All of the managers and directors know this and discuss it amongst each other, too, and all grouse about having to tiptoe around people and their ego or face their wrath. Either way, none of these executives actually have the ability to change the direction of the business because doing so would be admitting that their areas aren’t doing nearly as well as they pretend to the COO. To be fair, part of that is because the company has no idea how to use the data it collects on people (and uses in ways you wouldn’t expect from a company with an FTC consent decree on it). People don’t really use the “free tv” products, but they’re trying to build a business on it. This is obvious with even the most low key data analysis, but the people running data have no clue how to understand it and basically won’t try to because everyone would look bad - and they’re too afraid they’re gonna lose their empire to cross anyone. It almost doesn’t matter, though. VIZIO can’t actually record data on most of the CTV apps people actually use and the rest of the data they collect is just your grandparents in Iowa watching FOX News on cable (yes, it’s a well known issue that no one buys VIZIOs in major cities). Cable viewing data is becoming less and less valuable the more people use the smart TV apps. That entire line of business will fall apart, and that will force even more Game of Thrones for everyone. So if any of that sounds fun, please join - just don’t say you weren’t warned. Absolutely everyone talks about it at all times with everyone internally. VIZIO had around a 4 star rating on Glassdoor a while back, and it’s sunk to around 2.5 (sometimes below), and it should be pretty clear why at this point. You won’t change a single thing by joining, but you will feel worse about yourself every day, and wonder if you did something bad in a past life to deserve this. But at least you’ll get to hear a lot of good trash talk. The piping hot tea will warm your fading soul at night like a soft down blanket.
