Unstable - Help Desk Analyst KWI Employee Review

1.0
11 Mar 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You get to work and bond with some good people and mix some good music if you are into it. If you are on the help desk you get to go home after the workday and cuddle up with a bottle of ciroc and try to leave your problems behind. If you are not on the help desk you are not so lucky.

Cons

Overall I am living a bad experience and only served to make me regret leaving my previous job and appreciate what i had before. From the beginning I was lied to about what to expect and told things that enticed me to join them, The bottom line is this: Management of this company is top-down to the extreme. And flowing from the top is nothing but paranoia and delusion from t he CEO. This permeates down through the staff creating a culture of fear and resentment. As a result people amass knowledge and create silos to protect their jobs. There is little to no documentation and an insane amount of customization which makes implementing standard procedure and policy virtually impossible. When you do find documentation you cannot trust it. Nothing matches, everything is a hack. I've never seen a company that rewards inefficiencies and avoids improvements. If you are the type of person that can run around like your hair is on fire, snitch on your coworkers, and wail for 14 hours a day, you will get an award. There are miserable people with 15 years experience with this company and they violently protect the status quo. Almost everyone's morale is extremely low. Two to five people can call in sick on a given day. The company has a pretty bad reputation in the POS arena and a lot of clients are looking at other vendors as they remind me every day. The infrastructure goes down regularly and that I mean "completely down" a couple of time a week. Entire sites supporting half the customers will go down for an entire day with no communication to to clients or company personnel. There seems to be no accountability with senior management since this now happens periodically. An entire site will go down for a day and affecting half the client s and a single ticket is logged that is not classified any differently as a single broken printer when reporting ticket summaries to clients. Their software is not up to par with the what the competitors offer and the pipeline does not look great either. The experience you gain is worthless. You will become an expert in Windows 200 and old Solaris and poorly written software. Working with these technologies more than a decade out of date has resulted in experience which is minimally ( if at all ) viable during subsequent job hunting. This is definitely not a good long term, safe long term job: the entire balance of the company is held by two specific clients. If any one of these two clients were to terminate their agreement there would be a fallout. If you have a mortgage or kids or anything like that , stay away. I am aware the company has been in business 25 years but after all the outages that now regularly occur one can believe that customers will stop threatening and go somewhere else. Terminations are a way to deal with getting rid of personnel that are no longer needed after the holidays. There seems to be a constant fear that your job is at risk , there is a quarterly review system in place so they can easily set you up for a termination instead of a layoff. Human resources literally has no clue what it's doing. Bad recruiting, misleading applicants, poor response to internal complaints, can't figure out how to deal with payroll or benefits. Benefits are extremely poor. If you have a family your medical premiums will be no different than getting healthcare on the open market. They also have no idea how to deal with the mass exodus of talent. A direct result of the loss of talent has been mass outages and waves of extended outages. They cannot even provide a career path for people or advise management how to help with any of these issues. They are more like a pack of mean girls, spying, spreading rumors, playing favorites for the CEO.

Explore other reviews about KWI

5.0
14 Jan 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The team has brought in some really great leaders who are helping not only change the culture but also move us into new technologies that are enhancing all of our features. The company perks are great and the company outings have been more frequent and fun!

Cons

None that I can think of

5.0
7 Jan 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Financially stable company - been in business for 40 years. Nice people, Hybrid schedule, new office, working on totally rebuilding the product which can be exciting for the right person. Lots of employee events. Competitive Tech salaries. Annual bonus.

Cons

For those that are resistant to change it would be a challenging environment. Critical leadership roles needed.

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