athenahealth Reviews

Cons

The information in training is complex, also the navigation of the site is overwhelming, and information collect in training can get lost if you don't pay close attention to details.

Cons

Athena is a very emotional company with overwhelmingly emotional employees. It seems like everyone has to walk on eggshells at athena to make sure they don't offend someone. It's a very cliquey environment. It seems like everyone wants to belong to a group vs. being an individual, and if you don't belong to a group, you are looked at like an outsider or they just don't even notice you. Promotions are nearly impossible unless you are friends with or kiss up to leadership. I don't think athena really understands how to lead professionals. Their historical approach to hiring has been to hire right out of college. Which is probably exactly the reason for the overly emotional scene, as well as the promotion limitations. I do, however think that they are learning that they will not survive with the non-professional hiring approach. If there is one piece of advice I could give to the employees of athena, it would be "Shut up and work!" :) It seems like when a group of athenistas go into a meeting, they walk in with the mindset of "How can I show these people that I'm valuable?" vs. "How can I learn from the people in this meeting so that we, together, can accomplish or assist in accomplishing our overall mission?".

Cons

Cafe food good but could use more variety.

Cons

Really poor, unplanned, ill-advised decisions made in 2017 greatly impacted the success & vision of the Marketing org, the people & professional pathways there, and the motivation & trust of its department. Starting with a new executive being brought in with no one interviewing them; who brought no vision, no real talent, and definitely no new, innovative thinking; who became described as 'a cancer' to the marketing organization within 6 months by their peers; and who lacked any emotional intelligence. From there, things began crumbling.

Cons

The past couple years have been challenging due to growing pains, frequent changes in leadership, and Elliot's shake-up.

Cons

No personal life balance with constant travel.

Cons

I'm sure Athena is a great place to work outside of the department I was in. I was a CSC agent is was absolutely HORRIBLE. The worse job experience I've ever had. The work conditions were very oppressive and we were very micromanaged. We had to be logged into our phones for 7 hours a day (no restrooms breaks and all activities heavily monitored). Upper management would have ego trips in order to assert power over everyone else and made the job extremely stressful. The pay was very low as well (part of the reason why our department was eventually dissolved in the Atlanta office). I'm glad to say I don't work there anymore.

Cons

The company has never been well run. It's always had a "wild west" and "boys network" feel but since the founding CEO left there is a vaccum of power and un-qualified senior leaders are all trying to get their piece of the pie. They're all just setting themselves up for what they think will serve themselves best once the company is sold. Unless you're a developer, the compensation is only competitive if you're at a manager or higher cohort. There are few company wide standards or policies (for manager training, promotion criteria, work from home, etc) so people that are lucky enough to have good managers might have a good experience, but for those that don't have a good manager, they hate it here.

Cons

As with any large company, there are many changes and you have to go with the flow. Career movement can be stagnant.

Cons

Most of the employees right now are not unhappy. The company has been bleeding talent since last October when they laid off 10% of employees to placate a whiny shareholder. If you decide to accept an offer, you should realize that you are likely replacing someone who quit.

> Senior leadership is awful in many ways. No matter how far down the ladder you are, they will make decisions that will negatively impact your morale and career on a regular basis.

> The CTO, Prakash Khot, is full of bad ideas but thinks himself an infallible messiah of tech. I've never seen a leader take an organization high in morale and productivity and drag it down so low. Example: he decided a few months back that all teams across the entire company should consist of exactly 3 developers (with few exceptions). Every engineer that I've talked to about it said it is the stupidest idea that they ever heard.

> Highly political and back-stabbing environment. The CTO used company-wide layoffs last October to forcefully remove the entire senior leadership team in Austin. These were the best leaders I've ever worked with in my life and did their jobs extremely well, but the CTO resented them for pushing back against his demands and often awful agenda (see: 3 developer teams). Morale in Austin has absolutely plummeted since and shows no signs of recovery.

> Low autonomy for certain groups and teams. If you don't have any desire to design anything and are content with just taking orders from above, you'll be fine.

> The company is notorious for re-orgs because SLT at the top are incompetent and unable to provide any stability. This often means having your project abruptly canceled (even if it's 99% done) for BS reasons like a change in SLT's "vision". About half of the projects I've worked on have been canceled for one reason or another

> Career advancement isn't really based on performance, but more on luck. I've watched many great engineers be held back in their careers because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time (project got canceled on them) or had a manager who was too busy to notice their impact or didn't care. HR has taken notice and is making solid steps to improve this though.