8y
Firstly, while reading this review one should think to themselves – how likely is it that every facet of our 3.5 year old, growing company is so bad that the only pro we have going for us is free beer? Yet, we’ve managed to attract top talent and grow our successful company with major clients. The more likely scenario is that this is a disgruntled employee who was fired for cause. And believe me, we know exactly who wrote this. This employee was so bad and such a negative influence, there were entire Sr. Management meetings devoted to how we could extract them from the team without this person retaliating or freaking out. Certainly a bad hire on our part.
Secondly, I’ll address each of these items in turn:
Management is incompetent, unprofessional, and exhausting to work with.
Our management has collectively run/sold/operated several successful companies. No one is perfect for sure, but our track record speaks for itself. Also, when the employee who wrote this was asked for feedback on what could be done differently or what was so bad, no actionable or intelligible response was given.
They tout themselves as security professionals while having no security-focused talent on staff and ignoring large security holes in the software they create.
This is news to me. We have 3 full time security professionals on staff with a combined 30 years experience in information security. I teach information security and have worked with some of the largest brands in the world. Unfortunately most of this work is confidential. This employee is simply taking advantage of the fact that confidentiality agreements preclude us from speaking about most of this and arguing our point. If any security holes were introduced by code this person wrote, then I am sure glad they don't work here any more. I am also glad we test our work product.
Project Managers are assigned per project and argue each morning over developer time, causing over-allocation of resources.
This is called a resource management process and is used in every service business on the planet. How would this employee like us to figure out who is working on what when? By throwing darts? This is how we ensure a consistent workflow and prevent overbooking of our valued employees. This employee was encouraged to attend the resourcing meetings and offer any suggestions for improving the process. This employee was also asked to submit any other suggestions they had. Since the resourcing meetings were held at 9 AM and this employee could not seem to get to the office even by 10 AM consistently, no feedback was given to Sr. management. That said, we are constantly striving to improve this process and learn from mistakes.
The entirety of the development team are entry-level and fresh out of school, creating a lack of technical knowledge with no senior members to look to for guidance and/or implementation help.
We have a solid mix of all experience levels. This is actually just not true. That said, I am not sure why having a solid team with fresh talent and new ideas is bad, especially at a small, new company.
More office politics than at an actual corporation due to the divide between management and the other departments.
Any politics and turmoil pretty much evaporated when this person was terminated.
Developer burn-out churns out folks in less than a year on average.
Our average tenure is actually over 2 years. We are working this year to move that to 3. We are only a 3.5 year old company so I don’t think it’s terrible, but obviously we want to do better.
