Thomson Reuters Reviews in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN Area

Pros

Good location.
Decent codebase.
Fairly advanced Perl programmers in upper management.

Cons

Fairly advanced Perl programmers in upper management. Seriously, do you want that type of cowboy approach to business decisions?
Technical leadership basically nonexistent. This place could benefit from pair programming methodologies, but it won't.

Advice to Senior Management

I'm not a universal advocate of Agile/Scrum methodologies, but you need to adopt this -- quickly -- if you intend to keep expanding your team and its capabilities. No, outsourcing everything to Beijing is not the answer. Your senior programmers whine about it? Tough. They are not effective at conveying what they know to their teams, and the work suffers as a result.

Pros

My experience at Thomson Reuters was that I received good projects, and had good team leadership. The lunchrooms are excellent and location is close to the cities.

Cons

On levels higher than Team Leadership my impression was that management was very very poor at best. My offer at the company following my prior work with them was approximately 15 percent less that competitors. I chose not to take this offer as the location has a higher cost of living and pay was less.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a serious look at productivity and effectiveness of all of the jobs that have been migrating overseas. Is it really worth it? The prime product is now being designed and maintained very far away, and it seems difficult to maintain quality and velocity without having a strong connection with the users.

Pros

Seems like a good place to work if you want a 9-5 job. If work is just a way to support your life it might be the place for you.

The company is gigantic and layoffs are infrequent compared to the rest of the software industry.

If you like the work there are lots of projects and they seem to move people around and reorg a lot so you won't get bored. The projects are large and they recognize it takes time to do the job right. I haven't seen any all night rush sessions or whole teams working the weekend, which is nice.

If you like bankers hours TR has you covered, its a ghost town after 6, and they seem family friendly.

Lots of interesting, genuinely nice people from all over the world are constantly coming and going. TR doesn't focus on just the US or Europe, they really are world wide.

Cafeteria is good, and free ice tea and milk.

Cons

The managers and senior people are conservative about hours, dress, and the work environment in general compared to the rest of the software industry. For instance; they discourage telecommuting, the core hours are 8-5, they seem to frown on wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Not surprising given they roots as West Publishing. As someone who has spent my career at various software companies though, I was surprised by this and can see why good people move on eventually.

For what its worth, TR is almost solely a web/server development shop and is tied to this model. If you work on a non server based product it can be frustrating as they don't seem to realize that all bugs can't be addressed immediately by a hot fix to the website.

TR uses agile development to a point. They use short development cycles (sprints) but that's about all of the agile method they have adopted.

Communication amongst teams seems to be done on a management level and its hard to figure out who does what unless you've worked there a while.

Parking is a nightmare. 7000 people and no ramp in the MN winter. They do run shuttle buses to the outer lots.

Location is ok, but not if you like to get out at lunch. Its several miles from anything and when you reach your vehicle its time to go back to work.

Engineers are given no personal space or privacy. The tiny desks are arrayed in huge rooms facing each other. They say it fosters collaboration but everyone wears headphones and hides behind their screen. There are white noise generators in the ceiling which emit a constant fan noise all day.

For a building with so many people you think they could put in a health club or at least an alternative place to eat. I'm sure some business would be happy to have a captive audience. There is a good coffee shop though.

Final gripe: the security people can be real a-holes.

Advice to Senior Management

Too many chiefs, not enough workers. Acknowledge all the people who actually produce the products. Oh, and treat your employees to a parking ramp.

Pros

Most departments are very good with work life balance, many are excellent.
It is fairly easy to move around in the company if you want to learn new skills.
The company almost nevers fires employees, and rarely lays off engineers, so you can consider your job pretty safe.
Nice amenities at the Eagan location - coffee shop, 2 cafes, convenience store, a bank, and more.

Cons

Compensation is low, and yet the company continues to expect more from its employees.
Morale is pretty low in many departments, and turnover is high.
Managers rarely provide real feedback, and it is hard to find out where you are in terms of promotions or compensation increases.
Poor performers are neither punished nor fired.
The company has more bureaucracy than the government - getting something done that should take someone 5 minutes can cost you hours.
Bonuses and recognition are not tied to individual performance, but to projects or departments you may happen to be assigned to. Group or team recognition is usually very political.
Promotions have been rare lately except at the top - lots of executives shuffling around and giving themselves loftier titles, but little occurring at the bottom.

Advice to Senior Management

If it were possible to accurately measure productivity drops in the past year that are related to working conditions, top performers leaving, and poor compensation, you would be shocked. But as usual you would likely not actually hold anyone accountable.

Pros

Thomson Reuters is solid across the board. Reoccurring revenue makes it predictable business and allows them to make aggressive business decisions.

Cons

Strong growth can present challenges in how to best organize the company with future acquisitions.

Pros

Good starting job, good trainining for new employees and lots of opportunities because lots of re-organizations that create new opportunities although frustrating with how often changes happen.

Cons

very large organization and easy to get lost in the shuffle

Pros

*Some* smart people.
Occasional training programs for employees.
The job is interesting for a few months before you realize you are doing the same thing again and again. For months together.
Good company if you prefer work-life balance, a guaranteed job, laid back atmosphere and mildly challenging work.

Cons

Each team at TR has one rockstar developer and the entire team rests on him/her to get the job done. If that developer is on leave, work just stalls. Lead Software engineers do not do ANY coding and it gets frustrating when they start meddling with your code just for kicks.
People are demotivated in general. Not doing their work is not met with any action during the reviews. Employees just come in, talk on the phone the whole day and spend hours on Facebook and twitter. Even worse, some softies check in buggy code and make life hell for the guys who actually do the work.
Management treats software engineers as replaceable entities and does not respect them enough - I personally knew a business lead who threw tantrums and treated a dev on my team like crap. Management in general does not seem to know what to do with all the useless projects lying around and decides the best thing to do is shift resources.
Review process is a joke. Managers take it very lightly. Micromanagement is not uncommon.

Advice to Senior Management

Please respect your engineers. Without them, you will just be a bunch of lawyers. Try to get a hang of industry standards when you pay your engineers. There is a 20-30k difference between the industry average and what you guys pay. Hiding behind the recession and dumping the load on the Bangalore teams does not necessarily fit with your mission that the "Business is global". If you claim to be a technology company, then act like one.

Pros

The "official" work/life balance is pretty good with good time off and 40 weeks. However the norm in the last few years has become to work more and more overtime.
Co-workers are great.
If you are in the right area you get good opportunity to work with relevant technologies.

Cons

It's getting comical how under market people are being paid for my position.
The review and promotion structure is bureaucratic through and through. More non-management people are realizing that there are team quotas stopping them from getting proper reviews.
Reshuffling people is now a normal activity, stilting any chances for advancement because you are under new management ever 9 months.
Employees are absolutely just a number to the company. Nothing more.

Advice to Senior Management

Either your strategy is to speed the attrition of talent from TR (in which case you are winning!) or we are too big and have too much management to the point where we can't move fast enough to deal with the problems if we wanted to.

Pros

Really good with vacation and time off for life events. They realize that work is not life and life is not work but to have a good work-life, you must also have a good life.

Cons

Tend to treat software engineers as replaceable units or COGs. One is as good as the next and we can just swap in resource x for resource y. They do not value the opinions of their employees unless they closely match the management line.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees. They have great ideas... Honestly it seems like upper management wants to listen, but middle and lower management are still afraid to make waves, so you end up with upper management asking for honest feedback, but all feedback being filtered through a layer that is afraid to say anything revolutionary.

Pros

Agile Methodologies
Business teams work with you closely

Cons

Salary is not competent enough

Advice to Senior Management

Salaries should be revisited.