US Biometrics Reviews

Pros

Good industry, lots of potential in biometrics. The opportunity for retail, banking and national security is/wass there.

Cons

The company is very disorganized. It lacks leadership and vision. Management can't see past the end of their noses. To be in an industry that has such growth and not executes is a crying shame. They hop from idea to idea and never finish anything. Products are hurled out and then abandoned. Basically an edict will come down and a flurry of activity will occur, a lot of it unproductive and some product will go out the door. Then because the original release lacks the quality needed they end up having the customer send it back and more bad press will occur. They have had products fail in the market place because of an initial poor design that was passed down from on high and the design flaws would not be corrected because the top guy didn't issue the edict. It's so sad to see sucj opportunity get wasted.

Advice to Senior Management

Figure out where you want to be, communicate, communicate, communicate this to staff and perhaps some headway might be made. Evaluate the technical management.

Pros

The industry is an exciting place to be right now. It kept many of us there doing our possible best under the poor management and inferior software design. We referred to being there to "drinking the Cool-aid". The biometric industry is an exciting and exhilarating place to be right now. The company wisely focused on the commercial applications rather than the government applications for biometric security and fraud prevention. For those of us who started shortly after the company launched and stuck it out for 5+ years, we felt were were really building something exciting - in spite of executive management.

Cons

The executive management was clueless. If I ever work for a start-up again, Prior to agreeing to join I will first get to know the people who are running the company and making the decisions. They will absolutely NEED experience with a start-up in an emerging technology, or they will absolutely believe in bringing in outside consultants to establish the proper procedures and policies. It is beyond us why the investor group did not get involved sooner. Kudos to the founders, Delgrosso and Orr, for ONE thing - a fantastic idea - just had absolutely no clue how to deliver on the idea. They had no processes and did not understand the value of "best practices." They used and abused the privilege of the fantastic talent (developers and sales) they baited to come on board. These talented people suffered under poor management; the lack of communication, incomplete or no processes for quality and services, disciplining when asking management "why?" or suggesting alternative more effective methods, changes in direction at the drop of the hat, spending money on international travel when we still needed to make a name in the USA, etc etc etc.

Advice to Senior Management

Advice to the Investor Group: If the investor is still a believer in the ideas; commercial uses for biometrics as a method of preventing identity theft and saving businesses money in lost productivity, time theft and internal fraud - then my advice is to reach out to the alumni of US Biometrics (talented developers and sales), hire executive management with start-up experience, stay involved in operating the business and poise the company to successfully and profitably ride on the waves of the biometric frontier.

Pros

To be fair about it, I had a decent job during the long tech downturn. And, believe it or not, I have worked in worse places. They really don't treat their employees so terribly in some important respects, in terms of timeoff and flexible working hours. Also, they don't yell at and or abuse people. It's not a sweatshop.

Cons

Management was overly secretive, and outright deceptive concerning advancement opportunities. Software design was a joke. Unrealistic, overly simplistic designs would be handed down, and you were expected to make it work. On one occasion, we were handed a silly database design that really was just glorified ini file, consisting of name value pairs. When told that the design wouldn't work, and that this had been tried and failed before, management simply scoffed and insisted it be made to work. When the attendant problems with performance manifested, well, there was a certain told-you-so satisfaction.

Advice to Senior Management

None. The senior management is the problem. The sales manager is the only one with a clue.

Pros

Pay is not that bad

Cons

Mental anguish. Working for a company without vision.

Advice to Senior Management

Have a plan