Not that it really makes it any better, but the engineering/tech side is almost completely divorced from the sales side when it comes to work life balance and culture. Most of the complaints I see across the internet come from folks who worked in the sales centers which, even internally, I've heard was a pretty awful environment if you weren't in the top 10%. New agents in particular were burned through quickly as they really only had the worst shifts to pick from, so climbing the ladder was a long and arduous journey.
I worked there for a couple of years and it was honestly a great experience. I'm sure they've "grown up" some more at this point, but at the time it was all the fun, freedom, and flexibility of working at a startup with the security of a company that was essentially too big to fail.
There were a lot of areas, particularly with the more legacy systems, that were super painful to work with. But a lot of the newer, greenfield development was good stuff built on good technologies. I'm not sure how you could have this opinion unless you:
A) Happen to hate all of the technologies chosen
B) Only had the chance to work in the older, shittier systems.
I would echo that the sentiment is mostly for sales roles. With the sheer volume of employee history and churn represented by the sales roles ( phone agents, mostly ) it far outweighs the rest.
To their credit, RV is really an opportunity company. They'll give anyone who can smile on the phone a shot at learning sales. Some folks are awesome at it and could out-earn some early tier tech roles in their compensation for closing sales.
And the "creepy" profiling work that was done on lead gen would basically fit shopping style to an agent who had been shown to be able to close similar shopping patterns.
I worked on the tech side and wasn't enamored by the revenue streams, but if someone was shopping for an 'x' RV sure made it easier to buy it. That was their thing. They didn't do outbound calling unless you called in and asked to talk another time.
The tech side was very exciting. I met very skilled folks from all sorts of disciplines and people pretty much worked shoulder to shoulder, which I've grown to appreciate a lot since working elsewhere.
I did tech training years ago, and the company I contracted for had me interview with some of their team to discuss customized on-site training. I think I got the call because I was one of the closest people to their SC office, and would have been able to do multiple on-site weeks without much issue.
But... someone on the call didn't like my description of classes (like object/class stuff), from what I remember - disagreed with both some of the material and some of what I'd said about classes. FWIR, he didn't like them at all, and thought classes were "too much overhead" or something along those lines. I'd indicated that we could customize the material to focus on whatever they wanted to focus on. They were onboarding something like... 10-15 developers every other week, and this would have been a "crash course"-style "everyone learn the same thing to get started" - a combination of "our internal processes" but also "industry standard stuff" from an outside company.
We didn't get the gig, and I think they just settled on "in house only", IIRC. This was probably... 2009? Knowing they were adding ~20 developers per month was already an indication they were growing organically pretty fast (imo).
I worked there for a couple of years and it was honestly a great experience. I'm sure they've "grown up" some more at this point, but at the time it was all the fun, freedom, and flexibility of working at a startup with the security of a company that was essentially too big to fail.