Material Reviews

Unfortunately, the leadership at this company has completely destroyed any trust, morale and work-life balance that used to exist here. Junior-level employees are expected to work significant amounts of overtime hours to complete boring tasks through inefficient systems. The company is openly staffing people to a 45-hour work week, meaning you usually work 45-50 hours a week. Those working 45 hours or less are told they're underperforming and need to work more to help balance the workload. Promotions and pay raises have been frozen all year and the company has experienced multiple rounds of layoffs. Amid promotion freezes, the company hired offshore teams to outsource resources to, instead of investing in their own existing employees and systems. The company bids extremely complex and over-priced projects to needy clients who demand their results on fast timelines. This places a lot of pressure on junior employees to execute the work quickly, even though these complex projects need more time. This results in overworked people who are burnt out. Pay is competitively low and the company is hesitant to promote, even when not in a promotion freeze.

- Nonsensical time tracking: This company made me swear off any jobs that required me to track project hours. If we did not have enough work, we were basically encouraged to lie about our project hours to keep utilization high. At the same time, employees were reprimanded for skewed margins since a high amount of time was being charged to projects. Make it make sense. - Unhealthy hyper-fixation on utilization: While we're on the topic, let's deep dive into utilization a bit more. Management truly misused this metric, with absolutely zero benefit to employees. In my opinion, utilization should have been used to 1) understand how we should pursue new business opportunities 2) balance projects through each business unit properly. Ultimately, utilization was used to tell employees they were not doing enough, resulting in unrealistic expectations around project hours. Basically, schedules were stacked with 8+ hours of work (which always resulted in overtime, considering the fact that if anything additional came up, you'd have to stay late). The way the company calculated utilization didn't even make sense. Mandatory holidays and PTO (including sick days) lowered your utilization, resulting in the need to "make up" for those hours in order to keep your utilization high. I reiterate--make it make sense. - Terrible work-life balance: Piggybacking off my last point, the work-life balance was truly terrible. Working 10-12 hour days was a regular occurrence. Be prepared to receive messages over the weekend and emails late at night or super early in the morning. I've been in meetings where people openly joked about working 60+ hour weeks for months. Smells like Stockholm Syndrome. - Pay does not match expectations: If salaries were extremely competitive, my previous points would have been *somewhat* more excusable. However, salaries were average at best, bordering abysmal due to a long pay freeze (unsure the status of this since I no longer work there). And of course, no overtime pay despite always having to work overtime. Cool! - Obnoxious leadership: Oh brother, where do I begin? Senior leadership, I am speaking to you directly: Stop trying to be quirky and relatable during important company meetings. I don't want to hear about your kids making fart jokes during an All Hands. I want to know whether I'll be able to afford rent next year. Hope this helps! All jokes aside, this job severely impacted my mental health. After accepting a new role, I found it difficult to forget the high-stress mindset that I learned here, and I was pretty on edge despite my new employer being considerably more chill. It took awhile for me to not have anxiety closing my laptop at 5pm sharp. Needless to say, quitting was one of the best things I did for myself.