Q&A With Bankrate, Inc. Employees

Unlimited Vacation is perhaps the best, but on paper, because you'll rarely get to take it. 401K, Medical, some happy hours that is spread out and happens once a quarter. Free food, when you're working at 7, 8, 9pm.

The past two years it's been really bad, but after the revelation of the merger, even worse. In the beginning of the year, there were a lot of layoffs in Florida. The New York Office in general have a very "tight" vibe going with politics and positioning between everyone being the norm. There's also this idea that Florida is expendable and perhaps will be gone in another year or two, moving most resources to NY and Detroit. Most of the good employees left a long time ago and some held out until the end of last year, so any new employees walk into and just take on the negative vibe that's very prevalent from the top down.

OOP Questions, SOA Questions, .NET / PHP specific, WordPress Plugins and some very rudimentary Database (SQL and NoSQL). Depending on who you talk to you might also be questioned on AWS Dev ops type work, although there's a team that takes care of Dev Ops on AWS.

All parts are struggling. There's no innovation, they have no idea where to go with Product, gutted the Data Science team, so in short, the best thing is the merger and hopefully new ideas and new blood. That's the only hope for growth at this time.

Scott, the Bankrate.com CEO is pretty good, but still lack experience. Ken, the Bankrate Inc., CEO is all about the Benjamins, so as a shareholder, expect him to be looking out for you. As an employee, not so much, and now that Bankrate is going back to being private, you know what that means. I would be surprised if in a year either Ken or Scott is still around.

There's no focus on work /life balance. Most of the time, there's late requirement changes that require planned sprints to run over and therefore call long and additional hours to be put in. This is not the exception, but the norm and often is because the business will over rule the Product owners with deadlines and requirement changes.

It's pretty inconsistent. Depending if the VP's like you, or your resume, you might get an easy pass. If you were to answer something that contradicts the existing architecture (designed by the VP's), you will most likely not get any further. Your best bet is to impress the CTO. He's got a lot of influence on the hires being made and often will swing the vote.