Since being bought by Internet Brands a few years ago, a lot of the effective managers left. In some instances, whole departments abandoned ship. This means that the people who are now in middle-to-upper management positions didn’t get them because they earned them, they got them because they were the only ones left and IB was desperate to keep them from leaving, too.
IB’s way of keeping this from happening again appears to have been by making each role SO specific that it becomes essentially useless. There is no overlap between departments and teams, so no one understands what anyone else is doing or how their role contributes. It is basically an assembly line with very few people even knowing what the finished product is.
You will learn no skills here, and the skills that other companies expect a role to have are not going to be present here.
IB is also unwilling to promote or offer salaries. If you come in after a merge (which is how Medscape seems to acquire most of its employees), your title and salary will remain the same. Even if someone else with your title makes more than you, HR will refuse to give you a salary adjustment because your currently salary is too low and they can only go to a certain percentage. If you want a promotion, it has to be one step up, not more. Which means in a lot of cases, people have entry-level positions but are performing managerial roles. But they won’t change your title because your salary is too low (wonder what the solution to that could be). It just goes in circles like this unless you have someone higher in management fighting for you.
If you’re a client — you’re probably not getting what you pay for, and the company regularly bends the rules of CME in order to make sales happy. The sales team doesn’t bother looking at any of the product specs they have, they sell things that can’t actually be done and then make other teams find a way to fake it so they don’t have to go back to the client and tell them they sold them something the company doesn’t actually create.
The CEO regularly sends out insensitive video communications that managers — and sometimes even the company president — have to follow up with company-wide apologies on his behalf, telling everyone to ignore him. It’s ridiculous.
If you’re in desperate need of employment, go for it, but keep job-hunting and don’t feel guilty about leaving for a better opportunity, no matter how soon it comes up. You’ll be better off.
