Railinc Reviews

Pros

Work life balance is great at Railinc and the work is meaningful. Dealing with a real world component and not just commercial web sites,etc lends a lot of meaning to an IT career which can be filled with failed startups and less than socially redeemable purposes.

Cons

The company is largely locked into Java which precludes the usage of some newer, better languages. There's also a lot of legacy mainframe code which is now being moved to Java.

Pros

Great benefits
Work home life balance
Strong IT

Cons

- weak business team
- quality is not really as important, or the bar is lower than it should be
- not selective enough in the developer or PM hiring process, looking for the wrong things recently.

Pros

Great facilities, on-site gym, great low cost insurance benefits, they really hire the best technical professionals, employee culture is good if you are in the right department with the right manager and management team, they encourage community involvement and charitable sponsorship and encourage continuing education.

Cons

Very limited upward mobility into management, they really only promote customer support staff to technical positions and the few management positions that open up are generally hired from external candidates and most times at least with the commercial services group, you have new managers trying to tell you how to do your job when they don't understand your job or know how to do their own job; employee culture appears great, but the longer you work there you realize that the really talented people they hired are not allowed to use the talent they were hired for due to some overly confident and bullish type employees that are not open to any competition to their own project ideas. When review times roll around those inexperienced managers will alarm you with all kinds of things you never knew existed because they don't know how to communicate to their team members on a one on one level on a routine basis. Don't even attempt to question your manager and try to work things out to an amicable solution, it is a losing battle. Problem, bullying and harassing employees are tolerated to the point of exacerbation of the good employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Promote managers from within and send your mid-level managers to management 101 classes. They don't know how to treat their employees, handle problem employees, communicate appropriately any areas of concerns they may have in a timely manner and generally don't understand the performance review process and how important it is to their staff.

Pros

Nice Place to Work for freshers

Cons

Be aggressive in hiring new talent

Advice to Senior Management

Great Job

Pros

Do your work and you are left alone. They are a growing company in a vertical and horizontal manner.

Cons

Limited upward mobility for non-IT

Pros

Great technical staff, great management that keeps things going, good benefits, interesting projects and good technology to apply to them.

Cons

Weird dynamic with the industry association (AAR), kind of keeps things in check and inhibits some of the cooler things that could be done.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep things interesting for the technical staff and make sure there is good work to be done. Keep the communication flowing as well.

Pros

Great benefits (health, PTO, pension, onsite gym, flex time). Good up-to-date technology stack to work on for mid-range developers. Interesting rail industry projects, greate coworkers and opportunity to do great things. Agile development methodology has made developing the right product for our customers so much easier.

Cons

Rail industry is tough. Board of directors constantly squeezing us for costs. Worried that long-term Railinc will be one of keeping the lights on for group of critical products. It can be tough to get good talent in the door.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to look for opportunites for growth. Expand companies we can get resources from - we are getting poor solutions to our resource needs from our current "preferred" resource companies.

Pros

- Railinc offers great benefits from onsite workout facilities to work from home options
- Health insurance premiums are VERY inexpensive for the whole family - a huge plus
- Very good communication from senior management
- Company/management has a good attitude about employees, what we are trying to accomplish
- Vital company in a critical national industry
- Supportive culture with very talented people

Cons

- Rail industry is challenging given some arcane governance structures
- Sometimes resources are are tough to come by
- Small company with lots of opportunity in the market, but held back by ots unique ownership structure

Advice to Senior Management

Railinc is an unsung IT hero in the rail industry - keep pushing the limits of what you can do!

Pros

The company is constantly improving, both in terms of process and technology.
The company is not afraid to try new things, which is good if you are a tech person.
There are some very sharp tech people there.
Great location with decent exercise facilities.
The company is very involved in charitable causes

Cons

Developers are responsible for 24x7 support of some really crappy old legacy applications, which means lots of pages in the middle of the night.
No funding to fix crappy old applications to make them easier to support and maintain and reduce middle of the night pages.
A bit of big-company bureaucracy in a small-ish company, but I've seen worse.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep improving
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