Alluma Reviews

Pros

Very supportive company. Upper management is involved and receptive. Plenty of opportunities to hone your skills and grow as an individual. Keeps us busy but respects personal time.

Cons

There are none. I love it.

Pros

Has hired quality talent, has a good mission, great benefits and PTO. Recent merger with start up should bring new energy.

Cons

Lots of wasted time on high concepts, talking about the work instead of doing the work. Too much theory and not enough practical.

Pros

Alluma has really good social mission and pretty ok benfits.

Cons

Social mission paid for by software development, thing is software dev is bad disaster. No body in charge has idea how to run software co day to day. No tech leadership. Aluma lost huge contract this year and will get very smaller.

Pros

Mission-oriented company that helps people

Cons

This non-profit technology company has a people-oriented mission, but doesn't know how to manage or treat its employees. The Chiefs separate themselves behind glass-walled offices while everyone else has tiny open-office desks. Leadership isn't connected to the employees. Leadership understands non-profits and philanthropy and mission-oriented endeavors, but not how to run a technology company.

Pros

Lots of potential in some parts of the organization for growth. Better decision making processes are being implemented, this has been messy in the past. Innovation process is just kicking off, should bring good new projects and ideas to work on. Diverse staff in many teams. Clearly things have been disjointed here, but there's a good batch of new senior leadership and a number of weaker areas are being tackled, hopefully with positive impact. CEO has a clear vision for the org.

Cons

Professional development is too ad-hoc

Pros

Health Benefits and PTO and the regular perks of working just about anywhere nowadays.

Cons

Terrible management in the finance department, unorganized and chaotic. Deadlines that are unrealistic and finance tends to be months behind schedule. Too much gossip and huge egos. Work life balance is terrible.

Pros

Decent benefits. Great holiday time off.

Cons

Leadership, leadership, leadership...or lack of. Incompetent managers. Incompetent employees. Dishonest executives. No freedom to do your job. It’s a do as your told environment or fear getting fired. Don’t be fooled by the “new” name, Allumna or something stupid like it.

Pros

We have products in the field that help people who need help. A lot of employees can't say that about their employer, but we can. Working on technology to help people can be a lot more satisfying than working on technology to sell widgets. The current management is trying to improve SIS. One of the ways this is evident is the direction of newer hires - many are savvy, experienced, and eager to make a difference. Current management is trying to ensure a sustainable future for the org. This is evident in the rebranding, the market research, and how they are trying to restructure the organization. The overall benefits package is relatively strong, especially for an organization of our small size. Almost everyone has a motorized desk so you can work standing or sitting, as you see fit. There's currently a consultant on site trying to help us improve our processes. Despite the cons I'm about to mention, I do have a positive outlook for SIS because I believe we are now changing for the better. I think the needle is finally moving in the right direction, and I see improvements starting to happen. We have a long road ahead, but we seem to be on that road now. If you have both patience and energy to help move a company towards improvement, SIS might be the place for you.

Cons

What you must understand about SIS is that it is a company in a state of change out of necessity. There are many areas that need work, and not everything can change overnight. There is inertia that resists change, and not every member of the senior leadership has their eye on the correct goals. The biggest con is that product quality is frequently second to the almighty calendar. Rescheduling a big release to allow adequate time to get it right is essentially blasphemy. Most employees won't speak up even when they know something is in bad shape; the few who do are stonewalled - the date on the calendar is set in stone. This is an entrenched element of SIS culture that severely needs to change; whomever is responsible for it needs to be corrected immediately. When a majority of the employees building the product know that it's not ready for production, but this collective knowledge isn't valued and curated to improve our outcomes - you have a problem. This harms morale and causes people to not care about quality. It's unacceptable to release something into production when the teams that build and test it knows it's not ready, and it's unacceptable that they should be so suppressed as to not even bother speaking up. Some of the employees do not believe in, and have no interest in, the social mission of SIS. This can take a bit of wind out of your sails. The recent office move saw our work areas downsized. Desks are small - enough room for a keyboard, mouse, monitor (only one!), and a 5x7 of your kids - barely. Lockers are provided which help mitigate the lack of space, but they must be emptied every night. The individual workspaces are conformist, minimalist, and anonymous. The desks are very close together, and things can get quite loud. If you value your personal space bubble, are strongly introverted, or value control over your workspace - working at SIS may be challenging for you. Unfortunately, our personal workspaces are not very attractive to the savvy, outside the box thinkers that we need to bring in. The architecture of the flagship product is awful and is a textbook example of how to not build things. There seems to be a few people who understand how deeply flawed it is, but so far no real traction for change has been found. We need to build things smarter and better, and try to get closer to industry accepted, standard design practices. No continuous integration. Poor revision control (TFS with a bad workflow strategy isn't working well). No effective collaboration tools (webex teams without the ability to even share a screen shot does not count). Things get done through brute force, not through working smart or savvy. This is an area that is starting to get some traction for improvement, and it can't come fast enough. Most would agree that we have effective security in place, but it is often a bit draconian and interferes with productivity. There are smarter, savvier ways to achieve equally high security with less impact on productivity. The lack of savviness is a recurring theme throughout SIS. We do have a handful of people who do bring some savvy to their respective areas, but they need to be recognized and empowered more so that they can make a difference.

Pros

Work, which most people do not do - because the company does not have any if you do not belong to their only revenue project.

Cons

Become part of the furniture, lose your guts to move out and become incompetent like their management.