software engineering manager

partner

senior product manager

sales trainer

operations associate

Shutterstock

I will start by saying that I am writing this review to help others, I am fortunate enough to have a good amount of savings going into this role but for those that aren’t prepared to take a financial hit beware and stay away. I am a Sales Professional who has been in industry for 10 years. 

This job is risky, some who have weathered the storm have seen success but at the cost of monotony, and never knowing what will happen the next day.
 
Turnover is such an issue, Sales Directors can’t manage the business because more than half of their time is dedicated to interviews.

Most are super motivated to start but that quickly turns around as you get an understanding of the business. This is what you will face in a role as an Account Executive, you will work with a team where everyone hates what they do because the job is robotic, and unfruitful. Prospecting for good leads is impossible, everything that is worth your time is taken, people are fighting each other for prospects, just a sad and toxic environment. 

Leaders don’t go through a formal training process, most companies spend 6+ months to breed leaders by giving them special projects and training to ensure that they are ready, at Shutterstock Sales Directors are the survivors those that made it past a year or two. They are sent to training for a week and then tasked to lead a team completely unprepared.

The communication is really bad at the Customer service/sales department. Management do not prioritize to update the team about changes that are being made to website and products. Most of the time,I would hear the updates from customers and not from management. 

If you choose to work for them as an Account Executive, I would advise you to keep track of your sales, bonuses, over time pay etc. They have a tendency to forget some payments. They also tend to forget to add your paid days off to your calender. Make sure you make a note of all of that.

They never tell you at the interview you have to work over time everyday. If you want to overwork and underappreciated, this is the place for you. You will find out in no time that you will be working with managers with no talent, incompetent, irresponsible, no direction, unqualified, only care about themselves and upper management kind of people. They expect you to follow their unrealistic goals and deadlines (there was no proper training either since managers don't know anything), if something goes wrong it's all subordinates' faults never managers'. Expect to have weekly meetings if you don't follow what the managers' tell you to do, they will start documenting everything you say, do, write and report them to HR to build case against you. I started sending out resumes since day ONE ! And I should have left early, I regret it the most. I sleep so well at night now that I am no longer part of this organization and not seeing those untalented, needy group of people.

I do not recommend this place to anyone even if you were my enemy from the past.

The company I worked for was acquired by Shutterstock. Shutterstock made zero effort to assist, and instead of one on one communication with the very small amount of people involved in the merger, just sent a bunch of emails for you to wade through and when one did attempt to reach a human for help, were condescendingly told: "we sent you an email". 

The management at the company that was acquired was shifty at best, but at least the small volume of employees made it tolerable and easy to reach out to other co-workers. Shutterstock seems to have too many people that are willing to shove off your needs to another individual, who in turn will tell you to reach out to yet another individual. They don't listen to the needs of their employees and I would not recommend Shutterstock as a decent company to work for.

Pay is nominal and managers preach a "work-life balance", but don't actually provide the support to achieve work-life balance. 

Of course I can only write about my experience with my immediate manager but...

For new employees there is no grace period to understand how things are done at Shutterstock.  Most professionals know how to do their job, just not how it's done at Shutterstock.

Management doesn't care why/if an employee is under-performing.  There is no feedback or discussion about job performance.  Everything is fine until you're out the door.  It only takes one conversation to turn an under-performing employee into a great employee but Shutterstock seems to only be results oriented (either that or they're too busy to have a conversation but that's just as bad).  They seem to feel that people are disposable and don't waste their time trying to find out why they're not getting the results they expected, even if their expectations are unrealistic.

I am working from my home, every day from 9 a.m. until I drop from my chair, 5 p.m. or 6 even up to 10 p.m. in the evening.

I miss my old job, to work as an engineer, to invent new things, to solve some real problems and to help production to go faster and easy.

I learned to be more precision and to look world from the other side.

Management is excellent and very accurate, fair and very serviceable.

My co-workers are all artists and they helped me to get in this job very easy and to make real good results.

The hardest part of the job is that I am always in my home, closed in my room, because the job require a lot of processing material that should be prepared for upload.

The most enjoyable part of the job is creativity and freedom in ideas and no one said STOP and go home to rest your self.

Was excited about working there at first.  Until I saw the constant turn over of personnel, management and direction.  No one in management is there long enough to create a execution plan and then implement.  Constant change of direction which leads to complete frustration.  

Culture there is terrible.  Every man for himself.  They advocate for teamwork however there is no transparency at all. No trust in employees.   Actually been lied to to my face by many people within my team. Even with a direct question...lies.  Team members will throw anyone under the bus to save face.  No concept of true agile methodology/scrum pillars.  It can be a very immature atmosphere and very unprofessional at times.

Shutterstock is basically a company designed to funnel money to about 12 people. The bottom levels are nice enough. Ping Pong tables and paid lunches to make people feel welcome, but yearly layoffs, poor pay, and no real communication between branches make this a lumbering beast of a company that is only secure due to lack of real competition.  Half of any given shift is spent fixing problems that started in another department, and there is a continual change of rulesets meant to keep people from looking too deeply at what's actually going on.

If Shutterstock shrunk their manager pool, and worked on internal communication, there would be promise here. Until that time, it's a wonderfully disguised pool of toxicity.

Being a photo reviewer was great for quite a few years- atypical job in that it paid per image, rather than hourly, so if you were efficient you made great money. The photos were usually hit and miss, but because (initially) there were high standards you really used your curation skills. Gradually standards got loosened, basically your job was to rubberstamp incredibly amateur photography purely so they could boast "the largest collection of stock photos!". The truth was that only 20% of the entire collection was ever licensed, the all the garbage stuff was just there to pad the numbers. Eventually they laid off the entire review team and outsourced the work to India just to save a few bucks- dozens of people lost their jobs right in the middle of the pandemic. Pretty callous decision by management

I was hired by Shutterstock as a temporary employee on the Quick Service Team (I think it was called), responding to customer questions and concerns. I was pleasantly surprised by how awesome the office is, how much I was motivated to do my best in the position, and how much I actually enjoyed it. The training lasted a week or so, and it was very well-done and set us up for success. Everyone I worked with was great. The office vibe seemed laid-back, everyone was very upbeat and friendly, yet a lot got done very efficiently every day. It was a very positive experience. When I had to leave the area for personal reasons, they let me continue to work for them remotely. At the end of the job assignment, they offered me a full time position. I declined for personal/unrelated reasons, but I kind of regret it!

After relocation to Montreal, my team was laid-off leaving me and another individual to transfer to this new office as remote workers. Upper-management did little to help, mentor, organize or lead much of anything. Employee satisfaction is extremely low there and my team of 5 was laid off 2 months in. After that, my new team (in Montreal) was about 6 of us - after a couple months it was down to about 2 with a third coming on from internal. I would simply not recommend this company. It was a disorganized nightmare. The only saving grace was my original director Adam. He is an amazing individual and I hate to see him putting up with this company.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Software engineering manager 3 salaries reported	$169,115 per year
Partner 3 salaries reported	$120,000 per year
Senior product manager 2 salaries reported	$180,000 per year
Sales trainer 1 salary reported	$80,000 per year
Operations associate 1 salary reported	$80,000 per year

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