Cynergy Reviews

Pros

Incredible talent, creativity, passion and dedication to great digital user experiences. Offices were vibrant, pay was competitive, energy was palpable.

Cons

Many, many things changed after the acquisition. Former owner of the company had serious personal issues, many of which led to the downfall of a truly great place to work.

Pros

This company was one of the most impactful, innovating agencies I've ever seen. Most likely you use many apps they've designed or developed and don't know it.

Cons

Long hours, high expectations. It's not a job for people without a strong work ethic.

Pros

The day-to-day work was perfectly reasonable and enjoyable and the people I worked with regularly were very intelligent and absolutely passionate about doing their job right while still being incredibly personable. We shipped good projects that solved problems well, and we could be proud of that work.

Cons

I heard stories from the early days of the company that management once backed up their employees when jobs and situations turned south, but around the time I arrived the suits had fallen in love with big projects and big clients to the exclusion of the smaller jobs that paid the bills (and consequently the need to appease those big clients at all costs), which led directly to the KPMG acquisition; if you don't hit home runs often enough, you can't sustain a small company. After the acquisition the emphasis on big projects continued, and while many of us came around on it there was a lot of brain drain in the year after the buyout. The worst part was that the new overlords caught the ear of existing management and hampered efforts more than they helped. Specifically, part of the year-end evaluations of management-level KPMG employees comes directly from the business they generate for other parts of KPMG, which led to a lot of projects for internal customers or unnecessary add-on projects for clients that didn't really need them, which was antithetical to Cynergy's way of doing business. We used to be excited about solving a problem! Now we were just "one of the many fine products" to be sold, so to speak. There was a lot of talk from KPMG during the first year about listening to Cynergy's way of doing software (which KPMG knew nothing about) but not a lot of following through on that talk; too much trying to shoehorn an accountant's workflow into an agile software development process. The project estimation was a joke (management wanted tech leads to file updated estimates once a project was in progress so the paperwork showed we were on target even when we went over) and the already-small QA department shriveled up pretty much once management offshored most of the work (because they were personally financially incentivized to do so!) over the objections of pretty much all regular employees that I talked to.