senior software engineer

customer service representative

software engineer

senior financial analyst

ai architect

Tucows

Tucows is based in Toronto Canada. I've never been to their HQ but I hear mixed things about the company up there. I can only give my opinion being an American employee based in the U.S

Working in Charlottesville for Tucows(Ting) is strange. Customers love the product and it really makes me feel good to help people. But over time I've have found the elements of Ting's culture that make us stand out from the competition being tossed aside in exchange for cutting costs and putting more installs on our schedules than humanly possible. When I started with Ting it was about doing the install right. Now it's about getting it done fast. We often don't have the right equipment or resources for a job. Leading to customer property damage and/or poor patchwork. Larger jobs are often understaffed at levels I and others on the team feel are unsafe. These staffing issues are not a result of headcount but management in Canada sending installers to do simultaneous projects that are not near their deadlines. Leadership has a spreadsheet with a number of projects without notes of the properties infrastructure, construction permit rules or complexity that those addresses or businesses require to activate. When we raise these concerns, leadership has made threats of termination. 

Advancement. Since my time with Ting, there has been an uncomfortable amount of turn over in leadership. On more than a handful of occasions, I've seen the power struggle between leaders who are more interested in being the top dog than doing a good job. This kind of workplace drama may be awful in a 9-5 office job. But when a team is working with high powered tools on a high traffic road and managers start fighting and threating to walk off the job site it puts this place in perspective. I'll be leaving soon and looking forward to putting the stress of this place behind me.

At this time Tucows is a weird quandary as it relates to the tech side of things. 

For a long time Tucows was a great place to work, because it was a tight knit group of people who worked well together, embraced open communication, and everyone would put in the extra mile to accomplish something. 

Sadly, over the past 4 years though, Tucows has taken a disappointing turn. The number of tech employees has exploded, teams have been fragmented, with an excess of middle management. The culture has shifted from one of openness to a dark one of carved out fiefdoms, where the norm is to say what you are not responsible for, rather then how you can help. Putting in the minimum effort has become the norm, and accountability is non existent. Covid remote work has only helped enhance these issues.

These newly formed walls of isolation between teams has created an aura of animosity, aggression, and as a result has severely damage productivity.

Work accomplishments are either not praised at all, or credit is stolen. Career progression is basically non-existent and advancement is exclusive to who you are friends with, and for everyone else requires an uphill battle to be recognized.  

Benefits, and compensation are under market value at best.

Attempting to communicate with management about these things, or speaking out puts a target on your back.

All of these things have helped fuel an exodus of long term employees, many of which had been with the company for 10+ years.

It pains me to criticize a place I called home for so long, And I hope one day Tucows can turn the ship around and return to its former glory.

But for now, I'm throwing up the red flag.

Pros

-mostly great people to work with.
-no dress code.
-good benefits.

Cons

-location. dufferin & king isn't exactly the safest area of town. i got mugged waiting for the streetcar after finishing a 3-1130 shift (then got in trouble for refusing to take the work laptop home with me every night after that)
-there is a lot of pettiness from other employees. if you say something they don't like, instead of talking about it to you like an adult, they run off and cry to their manager. i've seen more maturity in a pre-school setting.
-the managers have found a way to pit us against each other to make themselves look good.
-6 month probation period
-the management play favorites, and it's abundantly clear.
-lack of clarity for customers.
-lack of information to employees regarding customer promotions. you'll basically hear about it when a customer calls in to inquire.
-they stress that they want you to be yourself, but when you are yourself they come down on your for it.
-absolutely no consideration regarding schedules. they screw up, but you end up paying the price. they claim to offer work life balance, but at Tucows you better live to work as opposed to work to live.
-they monitor bathroom breaks.
-they'll change the way you're paid on a whim.

At Tucows you can do as much work as possible to profit your department and the company as a whole, but you only get a 3% annual raise. Regardless of working hard to get that 3%, other employees that are lousy about their job responsibility get the same raise. Tucows was giving ALL employees stock annually but have recently chosen to give it ONLY to department managers and other important positions. Only department managers and higher up get bonuses, which is not fair to the individuals working productively daily. The employees work daily to make things run smoothly so they should be appreciated by having the bonus split amongst the department fairly. Most managers are not doing any hard work but are reaping mass benefits. There is no “I” in team work and this proves that Tucows feels that it is. 

After 3 years of dedicated service, I was let go with just a blanket statement about the company moving in a new direction, and no hint about what I did to deserve termination.

Biggest problem I saw was a lack of communication across the various levels and departments - many times, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.

When a class of new hires was brought on at a higher wage than the majority of the tenured agents were making, there was a lot of pressure to keep it quiet at first, and when it did come out, a generic "Sorry, we goofed" statement was issued but no changes were made to wages.

Lastly, beginning in January of 2019, the wages were changed from semi-monthly salary to bi-weekly hourly.

My friend referred me to Tucows after constantly telling me how great it was to work for them, I almost didn’t believe them. 
But once I started the on boarding process it is clear as day that it lives up to that hype, and it’s because of the amazingly friendly and welcoming people that work there. The workplace culture is friendly and accepting, I never had a problem while I was there. 
If you do good work you will be rewarded and there are always opportunities to advance and even move to a completely different department if that’s what you’re interested in in. The management genuinely wants you to support you and help you succeed. 

We continue to push for change at every level of the Internet. Collectively, we manage tens of millions of domain names from .com to .xyz and work with tens of thousands of resellers (OpenSRS, Enom, EPAG). We eliminate all the ugliness from buying and owning your domain and email (Hover).
We changed what people expect from mobile phone service (Ting Mobile). We’re changing the way entire cities connect to and think about the Internet as we build and light true fiber to the premises networks across North America (Ting Internet).
We’re a collection of scrappy, stable, little, big brands. Together, we’re an overnight success story 25 years in the making and we’re a long way from finished.

The work is challenging, and you have a lot of space to grow and try new things. 

The company is growing really fast, so there's always something new. 

It's a very self-directed environment, and though you get the support you need, it requires you to be self-accountable, take ownership, and be responsible. Don't expect people to hold your hand.

Good flexibility, too, since they're mostly-remote and great benefits. 

If you like things mostly set in stone and super defined structures, this might not be the place for you. Think of it as a start-up but with the funding and expertise of a publically traded company.

This place is considered cut-throat by the cut-throat cultue of IT corporations in general. 

You are given complete freedom to work as you see fit and your salary is quite competitive in the field,  however your performance reviews and managerial assessments mean little to nothing.  People have been let go without any kind of warning,  there's very little team or morale building, and 'opportunities for advancement'  are pipe dreams fraught full of office politics.  Nepotism and tribal knowledge runs high, and no one listens when such things are mentioned.

They want elite employees but offer mediocre wages. 

True leadership is absent.  The department structures change and change again almost at a whim.  New departments are create, changed and deleted with astounding frequency.

The word 'planning' is used often but the effect on the department or employees is seldom if ever considered and departmental input into the plans is also seldom if ever sought.

There are also some major ethical and privacy issues with senior management.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Senior software engineer 2 salaries reported	$133,850 per year
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