SirsiDynix Reviews

Pros

The overall company culture is really positive and generally relaxed. Most anywhere within the company can be a great starter job.

Cons

The company does not pay well, which is why I call it a starter job. While many people stay with the company for a long time, experience within the company is typically not rewarded or well compensated.

Pros

They hired actual entry level candidates

Cons

Training could have been better

Pros

Great, heard working coworkers, work-home life balance, working on something that actually matters and is making a difference

Cons

Short staffed = extra workload

Pros

Great compnay to work for. They care about their employees and want to make sure that work and home is balanced. They support new and creative ideas to help drive the business. Management is very open when it comes to communicating.

Cons

Not enough staff due to budget constraints. There are so many projects and ideas and not enough people to bring them to flourishen.

Pros

Front Line Culture Opportunity to Learn

Cons

Stale Development and Product Line Duties Involve Far More than your position Little Recognition Beyond Immediate Teams

Pros

Librarians are the greatest people in the world.

Cons

Every year the private equity company that owns SirsiDynix cuts back saying"things will go back to normal next year". And after they see that people can make things sort of work well enough they don't ever raise things back to normal. People aren't being fairly compensated; when people quit, their positions aren't being filled; and development moves at a snail-like pace. Meanwhile, the qualified people who care about doing a job are getting better jobs elsewhere and the remaining employees and customers suffer.

Pros

* Opportunity to make a difference, working with libraries to support their users. * Purpose driven culture, connecting communities * Encouraged engagement with the executive team, everyone has a voice. * Experienced employees celebrating 10, 20, and 30 year anniversaries.

Cons

* Not enough time to do everything that could be done.

Pros

Sirsi has an amazing life/work balance culture. Taking time off, working from home when needed, leaving a bit early and making up time later are things you almost don't even need to ask for as long as the work gets done. Middle management sincerely cares about their team members. The culture here is to try and do everything you can to help employees succeed rather than getting rid of any employee that isn't performing perfectly. This approach has drawbacks too as you can see in other reviews. Some departments offer full time remote positions allowing you to relocate just about anywhere if needed. I have to disagree quite strongly with the previous reviewer who was trying to place the blame for the slow development time of some products on 'remote workers'. I actually work on the team that makes the product that the reviewer mentions and remote workers have nothing to do with the release time (the team has a single remote employee), nor does it have anything to do with under performing engineers. I do share that reviewer's concerns about the end result however and I'll mention that in the cons below.

Cons

One of ongoing issues we have at Sirsi is that we sell a couple of very old products based on outdated technology that take a very long time to roll out to customers each release. Sales really likes to try and push the limits of those products and promises the world to the customers to win business and as such, the dev teams have to constantly add new features to these old products rather than working on new, more modern applications and technologies. Combine that with the very long time it takes to get our customers to update to the new technology and you end up with a never ending stream of 'must have' features that keep getting added to the end of a release cycle...which results in the 2 year long issues the previous reviewer mentioned. This can be insanely frustrating when you just want to get bugs fixed and features added and pushed out to customers quickly. It is important to note that there are only a few apps that we produce that are like that; we have a full suite of apps that are cloud based apps that have releases every two months, hence the 'agile development' label. These cloud apps make up about 90% of development staff as well. Sirsi is privately owned by investors and I don't know how else to say this - our current owners are horrific. They have no idea how tech companies work and they are pushing as hard as they can to cut any expenses to push up our 'revenue' to make us attractive to sell so they can get their money and get out. This is incredibly painful as they've cut off nearly all funds for replacing employees that leave, allowing raises and promotions, training employees, research and development, and several other critical items needed for a healthy company. Sirsi's culture of trying to save and improve employees rather than letting them go when there are performance issues has some drawbacks - you end up with several dead weight employees who are just at the edge of getting fired for several years. Eventually these employees do indeed get let go but it can take years. We also end up with lots of mediocre employees who aren't bad enough to be fired. The pay here is pretty low for the tech sector in the area. Sirsi has a hard time keeping up with the pay increase in the tech sector simply because of their customer base - there are only so many libraries out there and those libraries have a very limited budget. It isn't really an excuse, but this sector has razor thin margins. You won't be paid at top rate here, ever. You won't be totally underpaid either, the pay isn't horrible, but isn't good either. Advancement opportunities are a bit limited depending on your department and the current owners, . The health benefits are very mediocre, hovering on terrible. High deductible only plans with an HSA and a fairly small match.