Watchfire – “Great developers, clueless management & CEO”

Pros

The developers are great to work with, smart and pleasant. They're a great bunch overall.

Cons

Their main product (WebXM) was impossible to use, customers had no clue how to get the information they needed. It was designed by developers for developers and nobody wanted to spend the time to see what customers actually want in the product. The company had been kept afloat by a stellar performing group of salespeople for quite some time, and would have gone under had it not been for the salespeople.

Management was incredibly unprofessional, I overheard one manager ridiculing one of his employees when that employee was not around. On the technical side, they were in the frame of mind that a "code rewrite would solve everything", except they were too naive to realize that this type of decision is typically a waste of resources and incredibly time consuming. Code rewrites are nearly always a mistake.

Advice to Senior Management

They're a part of IBM now, so the ones who were managers are not senior management anymore. I hope they take the effort to become more professional in both the interpersonal and business side of things.