Webtrends – “Great place to work for the highly-technical mind”

Pros

Great company culture. The people are friendly, genuinely interested in what they are doing, and passionate about customer service. That's actually pretty hard to find these days. Alex Yoder is extremely approachable, as is most of the executive staff. That's also hard to find. There's a lot of really, really creative thinkers and technical masterminds here. I've worked with other analytics vendors' products and can say that Webtrends' products are far more customizable and powerful, no doubt, and I'm very proud of that.

The compensation is very adequate and fair. The benefits are great, not many companies of this size keep the employee contribution of health insurance so low. You're going to be hard-pressed to find it this low anywhere except a giant corp like Intel.

Cons

The IT team are great guys, but I have to say I've wondered if there is a question of competence somewhere in their team infrastructure. I've never worked anywhere that had random office network or phone system outages as often as we seem to. (I'll admit the frequency has gone down a lot in the last 6 months, and I know the team has been doing a lot of upgrades since then which seem to be helping.) IT chose our new voice conferencing tool, which is unreliable and regularly embarrasses those of us who conduct calls with clients. Like disconnects and echoing. The last service was horrible, too. Having this poor of conferencing has never happened to me at any other company, either.

I've been here between 1 and 2 years, and while I'm not looking to advance any time soon, I do get the impression that there isn't a whole lot of room for that. You get very pigeon-holed into your role, which can be an awesome thing to build skills and focus on perfecting your performance. I can see how this could be a 'con' eventually. There are employees who haven't had a raise in 2+ years, despite good performance. The company seems to be doing much better in the last couple of years so I agree with others that this is worthy of concern. There seems to be new people hired regularly. I think it creates some dissonance between veteran employees and new blood; when you're new, you can just feel that your team members know you're getting paid way more than they are despite their undeniable seniority and proven skills.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't start fire drills every time someone in sales or tech support says a customer sort of sounds unhappy. It throws people under the bus by placing their names directly in the inboxes of executive staff and that increases stress levels so much that it makes it more difficult for the people who actually do the work to resolve the original issue/concern. In other words, have a little more faith in your employees and don't cause the domino effect of flipping out. You need to trust that your team members genuinely care about resolving client concerns as the people managing the client's contracts.