There are a lot of red flags at Sling TV/DISH.
1. Employee turnover is very high which should be a red flag to anybody. It meant that the staff wasn't able to grow and flourish in their careers at the organization. The petty rules and top down command and control structure made it very difficult to grow your own career.
2. The "Because Charlie Says So" attitude pervades the building. Instead of hiring smart people and letting them drive towards success, the Marketing team was getting re-oriented from the top with brand new goals constantly. The impact was that features would reach the website and customers without being fully developed. So much tech debt was being built up for that reason. And as a staff member I hated how i was always chasing new problems without actually solving the ones we just were working on. Nothing was done right the first time.
3. Having to be on a literal time clock (to be inside of the turnstiles before 9am ) was a mental drain. It was very common to sit around complaining to your coworkers about how a slow/sick kids or a storm or traffic caused you to be late or almost late... and anxiety levels would spike. One method of coping was to just turn around a go home and take a day off instead of coming to the office at 9:05. You tell me, which is worse: an employee who comes in 10 min past 9am, or one that doesn't come in at all. Or how about this, you arrive at work at 8:45am but spend 11 minutes looking for parking and you literally run to the front door to make it in by 9am. And then... go to you desk and fume and do no work to stick it to the man. The rules around being in the office at certain times breed anger and resentment.
4. Health Insurance deductibles for 2 people I recall was about $5k. And then after paying all of that to the doctors offices, you still end up paying about 20% of bills afterwards. So if you have any sick people in your family, this is a quick way to end up with very little disposable income, or even go further into debt, which is what I did while working at Sling.
5. Engineering on Sling is done in another state by another company. This really made the job tough. Any engineering/product work needed to go though the Product team at Sling and then into the intake process at the offices in American Fork. This was so very annoying because there was not alignment across the two teams. Trying to get any new features built to help users or the internal tools was like pulling teeth.
