OceanX Employee Reviews for Information Technologist

"Guthy-Renker split into three companies: TPC (The Proactiv Company), Guthy-Renker (Marketing), and OceanX (Fulfillment/IT). This is all public information. TPC is now owned by Guthy-Renker and Nestle while OceanX is wholly owned by Guthy-Renker. As part of Guthy-Renker/OceanX, management lacks integrity, respect, and loyalty towards employees. Guthy-Renker often has layoffs of very good employees--they are fairly regular, which is demoralizing. Executives and managers often hire their friends into positions, and consequently any honest and open feedback is punished. They moved into "Agile" practices at OceanX, but the culture is one of fear and intimidation. In Scrum ceremonies, we don't feel free to point out any issues or problems since we've seen others become targets or told to be circumspect. We've lost excellent systems analysts, scrum masters, and developers to this culture. One scrum master walked off the job after only 3 weeks or so. Developers commit to work in Sprints but we never get to finish anything since production emergencies continually are added to a Sprint. We never meet our goals, and most of the devs feel discouraged. Among management, there tends to be an underlying hostility that exhibits itself in discriminatory ways and backstabbing. You can't trust anyone really and so it's best to keep your thoughts to yourself. The new El Segundo location is too far to commute--for me anyway. And I don't like the new set up there. The positives are compensation (they pay average to above average), you get to try some new technologies (but still not great overall), and there is a good sense of community among devs (we support each other, but we are still at the mercy of management). We aren't given the tools we need in a timely manner to get work done. It takes forever to get an IT support ticket acted upon and there's a lot of confusion at times. Another benefit is employee discounts on purchases (if you use them, I don't)."