Advanis Reviews in Edmonton, AB Area

Pros

You get your own office, the hours are fairly flexible, friendly staff. You do get a formal yearly review and a less formal review at the 6 month point.
There are attempts made to understand each department and the inner-workings.
The senior level people are very personable and a pleasure to work for.

Cons

There seems to be a lack of communication across all fronts which leads to confusion, finger pointing, and errors
Is not paying employees salaries or wages competitively, a lot of good people leave because of this. The volume of work vs. salary/wage is very unbalanced.
Can be a stifling company that is afraid of fresh blood, change, or taking risks. Not for those who want to make their mark.
There always seems to be discrepancies with the numbers and mistakes are made that can greatly affect your ability to do your job.

Advice to Senior Management

Know your market and know the value of the work that's been assigned. Create a more diverse and flexible structure that allows for movement. To know you have reached the absolute highest you can go just means you'll leave to find something better.
Open the lines of communication, being a spin doctor may work with clients and the naive but the rest of us see through it and feel talked down to. While there will always be confidential information, every employee deserves to know the facts about the company.

Pros

Flex Time was nice to have (could start between 7-9AM).
Technical people that work there are very knowledgeable.
Employees given personal offices.

Cons

Low Pay.
Unrealistic expectations with respect to compensation.
Disorganized management.
High turnover.
Lack of a formal training process.
No incentive for employees to stay at company, company gave little to no information on pay raise, advancement, or increases to benefits.

Advice to Senior Management

Streamline training, very poor and outdated documentation for new employees to gain knowledge of existing systems. Increasing the general knowledge of computing science for programmers should be encouraged, but employees should not be forced to read large amount book via the threat of termination. Create a formal process of transitioning new employees from training to actual work. Critically analyze salaries and see if they are inline with job expectations.

Pros

- opportunity to work with FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, and Python
- developers get their own offices, with doors!

Cons

- This company really has no clue as to how to orient or include new-comers into their practices. They operated for something like ten years without losing many team members, and then their work culture turned toxic. Now they find themselves in a position of needing to on-board new people, but they have no experience with how to treat people who aren't Advanis "old-timers."
- stuffy work environment, fueled by undue attention paid to "professional image" within the software development department
- culturally conservative and repressive atmosphere, makes one feel like a faceless cog
- lack of documentation for internal practices coupled with the crippling fact that team members seem unwilling or unable to help each other

Advice to Senior Management

Get out of the business of developing software. Seriously. Fascist neo-cons like you have no business being near computers. I wish that I had some constructive advice for you, but you are just so far-gone that I have no idea where to begin, and frankly I am too pissed off at how your company treated me to even be willing to try and help you.