Pros
Work from home twice a week Free snacks
Cons
This company operates in complete chaos, with disorganization embedded in every aspect of its operations. The data systems are the worst I’ve encountered, leaving you powerless to do anything meaningful. As a software engineer, you won’t be treated as such -- instead, you’re more like a secretary, tasked with implementing poorly thought-out designs that consistently fail in practice. Even tenured team members struggle to deliver changes without constant revisions. Daily production outages occur for the same recurring issues, with no effective resolution. The staging environment is a joke and barely resembles production, making meaningful testing nearly impossible. Employees are given remote VM access to production to "poke around" and attempt to fix problems, highlighting the lack of professionalism and structure. The company attempted to migrate from a monolith to microservices some time ago but abandoned the effort midway, resulting in a haphazard mix of incomplete microservices and the old ColdFusion monolith still running behind the scenes. These microservices are poorly designed, duplicitous and bizarrely organized. Services pass data between one another in a convoluted manner akin to a child’s game of telephone. There are no integration tests or automation across these microservices. The only testing framework available, “end2end,” doesn’t run in CI, works for only a handful of services, and leaves everyone guessing at the true state of the system. Messages between services are frequently dropped, forcing each team to maintain extensive audit logs to deflect blame. Very alarming considering the company handles medical data! Much of my time was spent hunting down mismatched and corrupted data with excuses such as "It's okay, its only a few 100's of corrupted records a day!" My jaw dropped more times than I could count and its only a matter of time before this system seriously harms someone or worse! Database designs are equally disastrous -- each service has its own inconsistent and poorly structured tables, with no foreign keys or proper relationships. Bad data is the norm at Outcomes and the truth is no one there really knows how bad the problem is. Documentation is essentially nonexistent. Beyond outdated high-level block diagrams, there’s no guidance on how the systems are supposed to work. The infrastructure relies on deprecated, obsolete technology and frameworks that are no longer supported, leading to constant failures. Management’s solution is to spin up new services every time old ones become unmanageable, creating even more technical debt. The work culture is deeply toxic, with zero trust or collaboration. Tasks are micromanaged down to the hour, and employees are blamed or gaslighted -- especially newcomers -- whenever problems arise. The hostility is palpable, with everyone in a defensive “knives-out” mode. Management doesn’t have access to the codebase and operates based on “feelings” and “intuition,” which I was explicitly told. Security processes are overzealous and ineffective. Routine tasks are delayed for weeks due to unnecessary roadblocks, while glaring security vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure are ignored. It took months to get the necessary contributor access to the litany of permissions necessary for the microservices which are scattered across dozens of repo's in various states of disrepair. Every task was a nightmare in finding out you don't have access to something and have to wait days or weeks to get approval, only to later find yet more permissions are needed, on and on. A task that should take less than a day balloons into a multi-week effort. Management's excuse is they are operating in the "HITRUST" environment, meanwhile any engineer could dump whatever data they wanted directly from production at any time. Security at this company is all for show, wasteful and a complete sham. The onboarding process is laughable. New hires sit through generic and ranting AI-generated training videos that are irrelevant to the job, proctored by someone who sounded like an old radio host—an utterly bizarre experience. No training is offered on the actual product, leaving new employees clueless about what they’re working on. Needless to say, turnover is incredibly high. In my first week, I witnessed 3 engineer departures on my own team and several other staff were let go without any explanation. Job security is questionable at best. There are some tenured folks but not many last past a year. Compensation and benefits are far below market rates, with no equity or stock options offered. The 401k plan is basic and uncompetitive. Career growth and learning opportunities are nonexistent; you won’t gain any valuable experience here except learning what not to do. The company was recently acquired by BlackRock and now operates in a stagnant "operational only" mode, with no investment in new initiatives or real attempts to clean up their mess. The new owners should conduct a thorough, independent review of the technical and managerial practices. The amount of money wasted on poorly executed projects with minimal return is staggering, and the inability to consistently release changes without major drama speaks volumes.
