Q&A With L2 Employees

Unseat most if not all of the management and start over

Hire better, more interesting, less toxic people. Encourage an environment of collaboration and openness (don’t put internal teams against one another, they’re all creating research). Enforce a better system that would allow for better work life balance. Encouraging employees to work past 7pm or well into the morning is unacceptable. Champagne Friday’s don’t solve your people problem... you need a dedicated person for this.

the culture at L2 focuses on the status quo and relies on very antiquated technology. The only change that matters would be adopting a culture of change and improvement - which is difficult since their entire stack relies on 1990s era temptations technology.

No one is unhappy to see Ken leave , he’s self absorbed and completely out of touch. He should never manage people again

Personally, I think he’s out of touch in part because the team around him feed him what he might want to hear and not what he needs to hear. The founder of the company is equally out of touch but around more for brand purposes than he is to make decisions or inspire change. He did agree to sell his brain child and its accompanying slaves after all...

The CEO is like the captain of the enterprise. He wants the engines at warp 8 in 30 minutes no matter how many hours of degaussing it'll take to keep the ship from blowing up.

Decent depending on the team

This depends on the team. The expectation is that you put in more hours than not. I wouldn’t say that it needs some work for certain teams. Specifically the research and client strategy teams specialized in beauty. That group stays well into the night.

They don't enforce overtime, but many of the staff have become accustomed to volunteering it. Don't fall for the guilt trip and work life balance will be fine.

L2’s culture is unfortunate. Some hope Gartner will change this.

they do a I weekly brunch, though office parties and the like are on existent. Leadership seems content to let the place run on autopilot.

They are growing and they are good at making money just unfortunately at the expense of the humans who create, maintain or suffer for the same products that help them grow.

L2 relies on customers looking for a cheap deal, so growth is minimal and clients are sticklers for deadlines while constantly pushing the scope of a project. Couple that with how the project managers allow it in an effort to keep the client happy... I'm honestly surprised they are able to stay afloat.

That outside of very specific teams they don’t really hire for personality. A majority of the research and client strategy teams are pretty rude, uinteresting or just flat out strange people. They are great in some ways at L2 but they definitely have a people problem.

Generally friendly, but there is a lot of unrest and unhappiness with how the company is run so that stress can boil through at difficult times.

They ask a lot about what you would do in certain situations. This predominantly revolves around how you would handle unhappy clients and unreasonable deadlines.

the interview process takes about a month to go through the various tech screens and executive interviews. They generally want to make sure you'lol fit within their existing culture and not make too many waves. The tech screen should be pretty easy for most non entry level developers - do a fizz buzz exercise and you should be good. The executive interviews are where they try to weed out the independents and freethinkers. If you want to get hired stick to answers that indicate compliance and shy away from answers that indicate interest in improving process.

L2 needs to be willing to learn and change. The tech stack is in desperate need of an update, proprietary, and completely undocumented.

Insurance options are very limited. L2 does not offer dental, vision, or life insurance options. Dependent coverage is not included.

Many employees tend to be set in their ways and unable to learn new skills. Others cling to an inflexible soap box demanding change.