Groupon reviews

I was part of EDW support team for 3 months in Bangalore office.Worst HR in the entire Universe. Lots and lots of politics . They will throw you out saying the name of company policy without having any fault of yours. The team in which I was placed , the team members of that team never ever explained me anything properly .One of them was extreme rude to me. He had said many things to me many times which I can not write here.I tolerated all this because I needed that job very badly. I even informed manager once about all this but he did not agree. One day I caught few of my own team members making fun of me, I emailed manager copying HR head in cc thinking that HR would take action against those employees.But I was wrong. The employees who were making fun of me , they were not even touched.Not a single word is told to them and everything was put on my performance and I was fired giving the name of company policy. I was the one who should have got benefit of doubt instead I was fired saying that I did not perform. I gave HR many options like my probation period can be extended to six months,then they can see if there is any problem with performance or the matter is something else . I also gave the option of changing my team, because my own team members were completely against me. Both of the options were complete feasible. HR and one of my team member had already in their mind that they will not allow me to continue in that company. I was asked to sign on my own resignation paper in the name of co-operation. I thought as per company policy , I would get at least 45 working days , so that I can search another job in those 45 working days.But they told instead of that we will pay you that money. I did not need that money. I need my job which I rightfully deserve.

- So much re-invention of the wheel. There seems to be an active reluctance to use existing tried-and-tested tools and instead, hand-rolled, bespoke and (as a result) buggy solutions are preferred. Multiple duplicate solutions for existing problems can be found throughout the company. - They use lot of Ruby; when other large-scale companies are turning away from this in favour of the JVM (mainly due to scaling issues), Groupon seem happy to keep going with Ruby. I've worked on Ruby projects before and I've never seen it written the way they use it at Groupon. - There exist some "colourful" characters on the engineering teams. Some of these people have loud voices and strong opinions; as such these people have clout that they don't deserve. In reality they just produce noise or are overbearingly pedantic; the end result is not good engineering. There have been cases of work having to be completely re-written as a result of being over-engineered and poorly tested. - The on-call process is a bit dysfunctional. One of the engineers in particular is an "on-call hero", happily spending out-of-hours time on what are often really trivial issues or over-sensitive triggers. SLAs for services are often arbitrarily decided without any advance performance testing. There is nothing heroic about being needlessly woken up at 3am. - The interview process is *insane*. Groupon have "bar-raisers" (similar to Amazon) that can effectively veto the recruitment of a candidate, even if that candidate has received otherwise great feedback from other interviewers. Reasons for vetoing might be because the candidate cannot do (or does not know about) something that they would *never* be expected to do in the role. The amount of false-negatives must be very high. Also: "colourful" characters tend to select like-minded individuals, so the crazies-to-normals ratio is unusually high. - QA is an afterthought. Where it exists, it is administered improperly and inefficiently; this is a combination of a company culture that does not understand or value QA, a lack of QA resources (many QA engineers have left) and the "colourful" characters of those that remain. - The hierarchy would describe the engineering teams as "agile", following "best-practice", employing "micro-services" and all the buzzwords. However, much like the pleasant facade of the office environment, from an engineering perspective, things aren't so pretty under the hood. It is a bit of a Cargo-cult: teams might have meetings standing up, but that doesn't make them Agile. Headless chickens can move quickly, too. In the end I had to get out because I felt that my engineering abilities were diminishing as a result of working there. I hate being negative, but being honest overrides that.