athenahealth Employee Reviews about "senior leadership"

Pros

Athenahealth is filled with incredibly bright engineers. During my years here I have found tremendous mentors and developed my skills greatly. I like that Athenahealth is a meritocracy where years of experience are not required for a promotion. A engineer with a few years of experience can reach the highest cohorts if they are truly performing at that level. The other thing that is awesome is the dogs! I bring mine in every day - she is the favorite employee in the office.

Cons

Senior leadership has been swung around a bit with our recent acquisition. To be honest the effects haven't been felt too much in day to day activity. It was distracting for a time period, especially given the fomo on the conspiracy slack channels. Thankfully things have stabilized.

Pros

There used to be a culture, we were doing good, disruptive things in the healthcare tech space

Cons

Lowball pay, unreasonable expectations set by sales and onboarding, abysmal senior leadership

Advice to Management

Let Bob Segert go before he runs the company completely into the ground. He’s decimated the culture, is condescending and patronizing, and doesn’t understand the business. Also, maybe try hiring some people of color instead of white men on the leadership team?

Pros

Non-management people are terrific and a dog friendly campus make it a nice place to be. The mission still resonates and is important.

Cons

Be careful who you work for. How your life is at athena is completely dependent on who your manager is. Some manager get how athena is broken and helps you manage through it. Others throw you to the wolves, criticize everything you do and bury you in corporate politics. Senior leadership has not a single clue about the company they are running because they barricade themselves in their ivory towers and almost never mingle with the masses on a regular basis.

Advice to Management

Gets out of your office and know who your front line managers are. There are some good ones and some serious brown nosers that hide their disruptive personalities.

Pros

- Competitive salary, good bonus, company stock - Work/life balance is manageable - You'll work with talented and intelligent individuals - As far as medical software goes, athena has a good product; most doctors hate EMRs no matter what, but athena will rank pretty high in any kind of industry ranking list - There's a feeling that the work you do matters - If this is your kind of thing, you can bring dogs to work

Cons

- the turnover at the top of the company was pretty unsettling, particularly watching CEO get dragged through the mud publicly; i also think in the 3 years I worked there athena had something like 6 CFOs. It felt like every other month we were finding out about a change to senior leadership - mass layoff in 2017, entire process was handled just so poorly, but seeing 400-500 people lose their jobs without a ton of warning was hard to get past; I wasn't laid off but felt like the next time around I wouldn't be so lucky - the health insurance was less than ideal, if you're married, you'll want to use your spouse's, no matter what - the customer support center is a major point of frustration for clients, I even had a few clients who refused to call and demanded I handle everything for them - cases take far too long to be worked on, which frustrates clients - there's an unfortunate culture of "client-facing" vs "non client-facing"; a lot of operational teams are needed to face off with clients to ensure best customer service, and these teams refuse to speak to clients - constant reorgs and change -i listed company stock as a pro, but i'll probably never work at a publicly traded company again after this experience; just way too much power given to shareholders and while it made athena a ton of money going public, in the end this company would probably be best being privately owned so it didn't have to make decisions based purely off making investors money

Advice to Management

If there's going to be another layoff, allow for buy-outs first Focus on outpatient, not inpatient Go private and allow yourselves more control over the direction of your company

Pros

A few ago I wrote about how this was the best job I ever had. A lot has changed since then, most of it for the worst. You may be fine here, or you may not. It's definitely not a horrible place to work, but it sure seems like it some days when comparing it to how it used to be just a couple years ago. > The vast majority of the people you work with directly are awesome. > Work/life balance is fantastic. There are a days now and again where you are expected to be in the office, but usually you can work from home whenever you need to. > A lot of new projects and technology coming into play in the last year. I don't know anyone in Austin who is still writing Perl code on an ancient monolith anymore. > For the most part, the managers I've worked with over the year have been excellent and most people have a positive relationship with theirs. > The company mission is inspiring, although depending on where you land you might be doing nothing more than moving data around and not feeling inspired by your day job. > Free breakfast tacos on Mondays. Other basic free snacks and drinks are available as well.

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.

Advice to Management

> Send the CTO off to receive professional mental health therapy. The guy is a textbook sociopath and continues to demoralize and depress his entire org. I'm not even kidding. > Stop reshuffling projects and people every few months because you changed your minds about something. The lack of stability hurts morale, hampers career progression, and just genuinely makes people unhappy. There are people that have been at athena for years without ever working on a completed project because of your lack of commitment to initiatives. > The company mission and culture seem to have been forgotten in the wake of the new platform initiative, and that's a shame. It's left a void for many people in R&D who came to the company to improve healthcare, not build a new technology platform (that isn't any more revolutionary than what they do at Netflix or Google). A lot of people have left for the simple reason that they don't feel like their work is improving healthcare anymore.

Pros

Started at Alpharetta and loved the camaraderie of the office. It was very enjoyable to work across departments to get important work done. That spirit continued with the move to PCM. People seemed genuinely enthused to be in the office. There was a buzz and people got stuff done. There was a sense of ownership of projects. People were not afraid to speak up in order to make something better. And if someone disagreed on how to accomplish something, there were not huge repercussions for expressing how they felt. This sense of enthusiasm and teamwork was what made athena an awesome place to work at. Atlanta is a diverse office. Training programs are solid. They do a good job of explaining complex healthcare functions and industry jargon and get you ready for your job. Unless you're in Sales at the end of the quarter, most people seem to leave by 5-6 pm pretty consistently.

Cons

It became very hard to work across departments. Lots of "I don't know" and getting passed on to a different person. That sense of accomplishment I mentioned earlier turned into an attitude of complacency and bureaucracy. I wasn't one to always celebrate the free beer and departmental parties, but having things like that taken away subtly kills old culture that had been implemented. Then pretending like it's normal and nothing has changed. People saw right through that. There was HUGE attrition in 2017 on top of a layoff. An elephant in the room that never seemed to be fully addressed. And if it was, it was the same canned response about how senior leadership was looking at ways to improve the work experience, etc. For Atlanta, there isn't much room for career growth beyond being a middle manager, IMO. The benefits are bad compared to similar companies, and the CEO's roundabout way of explaining why they're actually good benefits does not really convince anyone otherwise. (The bad benefits used to be something that people shrugged off due to wanting to work at athena, but once the culture shifted, people started noticing discrepancies like that).

Advice to Management

Take exit interviews more seriously and figure out what's making people leave. I think some common themes would be unearthed. Be more genuine with your employees and don't be afraid of confrontation in order to enact a positive change. Acknowledge employee frustration and do something about it. I've never seen such a shift in company morale like I did between the first two and last two years I was at athena.

Pros

Before I would have said this is a great place to work for college students fresh out of school. They'll grind you down, cheat you on benefits, and underpay you, but leave you with a wealth of experience and connect you with some of the most amazing people you'll ever work with. Cloud-based technology is definitely the future, and it's a great foundational idea. However, with many of the current issues, such as layoffs and turnover, the company is highly unstable and doesn't appear that it can remain competitive in the long term. So maybe consider side-stepping this company for the year or two, and see if things turn around after that.

Cons

Poor management abounds. Senior leadership is always changing directions and focus, to the extreme frustration of clients and employees. Middle managers are untrained (I mean this literally - we have no manager training program), leading to petty kingdoms full of unprofessional leaders who play favorites and make poor decisions based on politics alone. You're generally unable to get promoted above one cohort unless you leave for another company and come back - oddly, they love this. This same culture led to the eCW situation, which is highly concerning.

Advice to Management

First, please have HR stop writing fake, 5 star reviews on here. It's awkward, transparent and highly against Glassdoor's own policies (we see you!). Once that's done, please be more conservative about how you resource work and spend capital (hint: maybe buying touch screen televisions and advertising to employees that you want to "fill the ranks" was a bad idea right after a 10% workforce reduction). Finally, work on a way to retain talented employees. A large number of colleagues indicated they were hoping to leave the company within the next year - focus on a plan for addressing this, and don't have the plan be to fill the ranks with exploitable millennials.

Pros

Great campus, cafeteria, and bring dogs to work are all great pros.

Cons

Untrustworthy HR department. Untrustworthy senior leadership. Untrustworthy leadership in marketing. Diminishing cultural values. Below market pay. Below market healthcare benefits. Marketing leadership spends their time "listening" but not actually giving any strategic value or guidance. They sit in their glass offices and stare at dashboards all day and then ask why we aren't selling. Instead of just sitting behind a screen, and attending meetings with CEO, spend some time getting to know your own team. They pretend to listen to pain points, but neglect to do anything about it. athenahealth has lost it's way, and after massive company layoffs in the Fall, many more will leave voluntarily in Q1 of 2018. Our competitors cultures are doing better, while ours is sinking lower and lower. Athena needs better senior leadership, less politics, and much more diversity.

Advice to Management

Hire a diverse and well-qualified senior leadership team - if the senior leaders keep leaving, how will employees ever trust them? Train managers and senior managers better. A 1-3 day course on "how to manage people" is not adequate.