New Business Development - Anonymous employee CWS Software Employee Review

Excellent management, great work life balance

Smaller org so not a ton of room for growth

I worked at CWS Software for a year and a half as a Systems and Product Analyst / HRIS Analyst. CWS Software is a great boutique company with a genuinely high-quality product and was really enjoyable to work for in the Greater Binghamton, NY area with a really nice relaxed culture and atmosphere with some great people to work with. Working here is thankfully never too stressful or demanding, as the workload and nature of the work is reasonable, though it can get pretty uneventful and routine after a while, but special projects do come up occasionally to break up the monotony. Full benefits are also offered, and the health insurance and other benefits such as that are pretty solid. Leave time, including flex time (lieu time), is also very generous and flexible and Management is pretty understanding of taking time off, as there are multiple different leave types available to employees. Management in general is great, unlike a lot of other places. In addition, the company will pay for some education and licensing expenses, although those benefits are fairly limited. Side benefit: the company keeps a stocked fridge of drinks for its employees, which is appreciated. Company lunches and get-togethers in the forms of periodic company meetings, holiday lunches, etc., also crop up, although not quite often enough in my opinion.

There are impressively few glaring issues while working here, as I would say the only potential deal breaker is the pay, which is all salaried except for interns. For the type of professional work being done here (functional analysis of a business system), the pay is fairly low coming in and not on par with what a similar position elsewhere would pay. It is the primary reason I had to leave, as it was already difficult to make it work financially. I understand that a small, boutique company can/will only pay so much, but the business needs to invest a bit more in its employees if it expects to retain them in this very tight labor market. I wouldn't expect many raises either, large or small. Also be skeptical for the opportunity for advancement, as it would likely only happen were the company to expand significantly. A couple of other sidebars: I found the equipment to be somewhat lacking. This is not a huge deal, but for what is essentially a tech company, it could be more impressive and high-powered. A middle of the road laptop connected to modest monitor is not much to write home about, and I had to buy a better mouse and keyboard setup for myself. It would be nice to see a real desktop setup with a multi 4K monitor setup, along with better headsets that aren't as flimsy. Desks and furniture are all nice, however. Some of the work can occasionally get frustrating when the system does things out of your control, like not being able to accommodate something a client wants or when experiencing a bug in the system. Thankfully, that does not happen very often. A somewhat bigger issue are the sometimes very complicated system modifications and changes clients ask for, some of which really don’t have streamlined tools available to resolve them efficiently. Creating better out of the box tools for employees to work with to more quickly and simply resolve client requests should be a priority so time isn’t eaten up time-consuming support or troubleshooting issues.