Sales Above All Else - Professional Services Engineer Square 9 Softworks Employee Review

Insane turnover - In the 4 years I was here, I saw a single sales position turnover 6 times. I consistently heard complaints of unreasonable goals and expectations without providing tools to reach those goals. Far below market compensation, unprofessional review process. I consistently had to bother management to get any form of performance review, and even then it would take MONTHS to get any sort of real response. Beyond that, compensation is rarely adjusted, and never based on cost of living or inflationary adjustments. In 4 years, my real income failed to keep up with inflation. Communication is practically non-existent between upper management and lower employees. I was constantly blindsided by changes, and my input never felt valued. Rushed sales process - always pushing to close deals quickly leads to poorly qualified, overpromised, underscoped projects. These projects are rarely even remotely successful, and sales never seems to be held accountable. Rushed release cycle - quarterly releases lead to major bugs in almost every release. This is to the point that I would not recommend existing customers upgrade unless they have a specific issue. QA team is woefully understaffed for the size of software. Documentation / Training - There are signs this is improving, but is still painfully lacking. New features are often released without proper documentation, provided to Professional Services to install without any real instructions. Travel - You are regularly expected to travel on your own time without compensation. Fly out Sunday, fly home Saturday, no extra PTO or anything. I have heard numerous complaints from Sales Managers that they were outright lied to regarding travel requirements at time of hiring - BE CAREFUL. Equipment / Technology - I was provided a laptop when I started that was several years old at the time. That laptop was never replaced and barely functional by the time I left. In-house IT reimaged the laptop about a year before I left, and did not provide licensing for Office. Licenses for their remote access software is 5 versions behind current. Web conferences are ad-hoc - you are left to your own devices to find and choose a service - they don't pay for licensing to technicians. Despite frequent issues with the free hypervisor they used, they have refused to purchase paid licensing for one with support infrastructure. Lack of Respect for Employees - This is harder to quantify, but even employees who have dedicated years of service to the company are treated as utterly disposable. One of the chief developers, who was responsible for 80%+ of the current codebase, had moved out of state short-term (16 months). Without any prior communication, he was relieved of his development team, and dropped to a rank-and-file developer. When he asked about why, or if he would be able to get his team back when he returned, he was told, "I don't need to run decisions past you." Completely toxic. That developer has since left. Management Perspective of Product - Management does not seem to have a realistic view of the competitive marketplace. S9 Products are not outstandingly unique. There are dozens of products that use the EXACT same OCR engine, and the same database backends. Frankly, for their feature set, products need to be much more stable and high performance, and much better documented in order to compete. As it sits, consistent bugs and slow workflow performance make for a less-than-stellar solution when presented to a customer. General Management Culture - There is what I see to be a MAJOR flaw with the entire philosophy of upper management. A quote from the CTO at the most recent conference encapsulates the problem: "If you can sell it, we can build it." For a company that positions itself as a development company, that is entirely backwards. Develop software, sell that software. Don't sell promises and try to develop to match them. Beyond that, management doesn't take criticism well - at a recent department meeting, they dismissed a majority of negative reviews on here as 'sabotage'. Further, management continues to indicate their focus going forward is on developing off-the-shelf installable packages (thus minimizing the need for Professional Services at all). This is a major mistake, in my opinion. These solutions are not something that will work well in an off-the-shelf environment, and lowering the importance of ProServ says exactly where management's loyalties and priorities lie.