Decent place to earn a paycheck - Manager, Software Engineering NiCE Employee Review

Cheap where it matters, lavish spending where it doesn't: - I couldn’t get permission to take my team members out to lunch individually on their work anniversary - so I took them out myself, impacting my family’s budget - It took a lot of back-and-forth, but when I did finally get permission to take the whole team out to celebrate a big win at the end of a quarter, I submitted a receipt with a 20% tip. I was reimbursed 18% of the tip - this was so petty (about $5 not reimbursed) I honestly couldn’t believe it. -- When I told my boss I wasn’t reimbursed for the entire amount, he went to the CTO and got me a $25 gift card to make up for it - an example of good local managers making up for systemic corporate problems - I am expected to be on call, but the company will not pay for my cell phone - If the spouse has insurance through their job, and you choose NICE’s family plan, you have to pay an extra $100 per pay period to cover your spouse - Motivosity: Shortly after I started, they took away Motivosity (a system where we had $5/month to give away to anyone in the company to say how we appreciate what they helped us with) -- This coincided with the old CEO leaving. From what I understand, the old CEO (Paul Jarmon) is the reason NICE in Sandy had the culture it did before I started. I believe this is why there are so many good managers in Sandy. - Pay increases did not happen at the normal time (October). Trying to manage my teams’ feelings around this time was extremely difficult. After more than a month of no word around raises, in December, managers were asked to give a hurried performance evaluation, and only those with the high end of successful and above ratings received a pay increase. (I agreed not to take a pay increase so that others on my team could have more because I had started only a year prior, and my salary was higher than it was before, so I was fine with it). - This is a billion dollar company, with $2 billion in the bank, no debt, the CEO makes $24.5 million in total compensation, and when inflation is through the roof, they can’t give regular cost-of-living increases to everyone. This shows how little the top level management cares about the people who are doing the work. - Every year they do some social media competition for the company. This year is Taylor Swift - flying 50 employees and their +1 out to London with VIP concert tickets to her concert (plus hotel/food/fun). The cost for this is at least $1 million - money that could be used to increase pay, bonus payouts, or allow me to take my team out for lunch every once in a while. - This company could afford to give cost of living raises consistently year-over-year and then more for high performers - but they don’t. - PTO not paid out -- When I gave my 1 month notice, I had roughly 2 weeks of vacation left. Because Utah is a “right to work” state and NICE is not forced to pay out the vacation money, they did not. This is typical of the company - doing the absolute minimum. --- My boss had to push for them to allow me to take 1 week off during my last month - another example of local management making up for systemic, top-down cultural problems. Performance review process: - I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the numbers had to fall roughly this way: 5% had to be “needs improvement” 5-10% had to be “Inconsistent” 65-70% had to be “Successful” 15% had to be “Excellent” 5% had to be “Exceptional” - If everyone on the team is at least doing a successful job, we had to rank our team members to make sure we had enough “Inconsistent” and “Needs Improvement” - This could incentivize individuals into not helping other engineers and good local management is the only reason this does not happen - Bonuses were similar - not everyone could get a bonus - Performance review process made sure that we had to hit the curve - Only successful or above receive a bonus - and if everyone on the team is successful, someone who is successful must be downgraded to meet the curve - resulting in successful individuals not receiving a bonus Work-life balance: - I was expected to be on call 24/7 - I had to set my phone to allow text messages through from the company line. Every few weeks or so I’d get a text in the middle of the night to take care of a problem (examples: 3am, midnight, 2am). Often my breakfast/taking-kids-to-school time was spent on a call troubleshooting some problem or another. I had to cancel or cut short many dinners out with friends/game nights/time with family due to these on-call issues. - The software was developed to handle a certain amount of traffic and while I was there, we exceeded that across almost all sectors I was over. This made for customer commits being missed due to patching, troubleshooting, and constant reprioritizing. - My teams were known as helpful, which is a culture that I was proud of developing, but because of this we were constantly bombarded with problems that weren’t anything we could help with. ----- Other teams were reluctant to help or take ownership. - Managers are expected to manage at least 2 teams - making it so managers can’t spend the time we need with direct reports and leading to work-life balance being off. - Lots of shifting policies and red-tape around getting anything done - we’re moving from start-up culture to more of a corporate structure so it was difficult in the end to actually get fixes into production because of the processes in place. -Hybrid 2-times/week badge scans: -- I didn’t mind coming into the office. Corporate put into place a 2-times/week policy post-COVID, so we have to scan our badges at least 8 times per month. I would get reports of people not meeting quota and I had to report why they weren’t coming in. Most of the time it was sickness, other times it was vacation. The fact that they put into place this policy without it being able to be cross-referenced with time off requested and taken is problematic. -- The fact that they feel the need to babysit us as if we can’t do our work properly without coming into the office 8 times/month feels juvenile. -- Personally I would rather my team take their hour commute and work instead of driving. This would result in 4 more hours of work per week per individual contributor. Other anecdotes: - I was in a meeting on how to improve company culture and one person in the meeting said he passed 20 years with the company and received absolutely nothing - when the previous CEO hand-wrote a note to him when he passed 15 years. - Teams are siloed and unwilling to help each other - I was in a 1:1 with my manager when one of our recruiters came in to talk about a new employee we’d just hired and he talked about how frustrating it is that NICE will not rehire employees for 7 years if they leave. It blows my mind how vindictive the corporate culture is. Other places I’ve worked have touted how happy they are when people leave and then come back with more experience. Not here.