athenahealth Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Cons

- Continues to use older technologies (Perl, Perforce) with no sign of incoming changes. - Monthly/bi-monthly release cycles means that you can feel frequently pressured with deadlines. - Development practices are too focused on solving short-term solutions. Good practices like refactoring, documentation, and unit testing are often not given any time. Software quality and development time suffers as a result. - Many managers seem like they struggle with work/life balance and regularly work many more hours than they should have to. - Not much in terms of a technical development track. If you want to move up in the company, you're pretty much not going to be writing code anymore.

Cons

I left because I did not see a way of ever getting promoted to senior-level and it was never talked about. I was always told how great I was doing and I got a great performance review score. After I left, someone with less years of experience was promoted to senior-level, so I have zero clue what was going on there. I occasionally burned out because I didn’t have any UX help after two people on the team left and those spots were empty for months. Additionally, I wanted to work 100% remote after reevaluating my life. While I was granted that option for the time being, I was not looking forward to eventually having to be in an office 3 days a week. I left for a role where I might go into the office 3 times a month (or less). There was also memos about losing out on bonuses and raises if you chose to work 100% remote. With inflation, I’d be losing money by staying because I wasn’t sitting in an office doing the same thing I’d be doing at home. Compensation is low. I got a 60% (!!!) raise by leaving.

Cons

The tech stack at athena is dated. They use perl and have a monolithic code base. There are a number of business reasons to use this technology but in general athena prefers to build everything from scratch rather than using open source software.

Cons

Work life balance is tough.My husband gets upset when I have to respond to emails after dinner. We seem to have to fight Sr management to change process. 'We've always done it like that' rings bells

Cons

You get hired into the 'culture' and they have the right to fire you within 90 days. Even if you are a hard worker and work long hours - it doesn't really matter unless you fit in the culture. The culture is quite the geeky type so it's not really for the 'cool' kids. They throw you in the deep end and expect you to figure out how to swim, if you don't swim within the first few seconds, they will push you down the pool on purpose. They basically set you up to failure so they have an excuse to oust you. The management team is not that experienced because they are so young. Most of the people there worked there from the beginning so they don't know how to appreciate a true work/life balance. They think this is the best company to work for but they have not had much experience out there. They hire college graduates right off the bat and work them until they are exhausted. There are all these cool culture perks there but no one utilizes it because you work so hard. The compensation is not that great compared to how long you work - it's comparable to auditing hours. They expect you to stay at the company and 'mingle' even after you have finished all your work for the day. If you leave 'early' (which is around 6:00 - 6:30PM), they assume that you're not interested in the 'culture' and that you 'don't fit', so they'll have the right to fire you.

Cons

Pay is not based on cost of living but prevailing wages. Even though Atlanta has a lower cost of living than Belfast, Maine, Atlanta gets paid 10% more. They have no loyalty to their employees. If a client complains then your job is on the line. Work life balance can be hard even though they say that they want you to have one. High turnover in client facing positions due to people being fired and leaving. It seems like the company pushes clients into what they believe is right rather than concentrating on what the clients want.

Cons

Many upper management changes over the past 6 months as well as large changes in project management. There's a 9-5 life style on some teams and a 7-7 lifestyle on others so work life balance is heavily dependent on the team you're on. The code base is all in Perl and in need of a major update

Cons

health insurance can be better

Cons

- Cultural growing pains of a company that just hit $1 billion in revenue - Annual re-orgs, which can be very helpful when certain areas of the company are not working well, but at times they don't always fix what's broken and instead they place undue stress on the organization and the individual - Work life balance can be difficult to achieve without setting boundaries (but possible!) - Consistent lack of female leadership, every seeming step forward never sticks

Cons

Pay is lesser as compared to other companies