SeaChange Reviews

Your career and life will not benefit from working there. Seachange's reputation in the industry is bad and getting worse. Within the company you will have no chance at advancement based on your ability or the work you do; you will only move up if you play toady to the powers that be. In my tenure at seachange I witnessed the following: *HR that routinely lies to and mistreats employees. This includes aggressively arguing with and lying to employees who were being laid off; HR would not even allow a dignified exit to people who gave years of their lives to seachange. *Senior Managers who routinely promised raises and promotions to rank and file then never delivered, and who routinely lied to employees and customers and left Engineering to sort out the lies. *One of SeaChange's Vice Presidents who rewrote employee reviews (without the knowledge or consent of the employee's manager) and placed blame for management's failure to work with customers on the shoulders of Engineers. * One of SeaChange's Directors who routinely thwarted innovation and improvement of seachange products and expected blind, unquestioning obedience from all subordinates, and who lied about subordinates on their reviews to deflect blame from his own mismanagement. * Seachange taking back accrued vacation time of California employees; that is, California employees experienced a reduction in their accrued vacation balances (without taking vacation or being paid for the reduction). By all the research I have done, this is not allowed under California law. * Sales force who had no familiarity with seachange products and who simply agreed with everything customers demanded then handed the mess off to Engineering to sort out. * Managers directing hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting work to companies in which they held a financial stake (blatant conflict of interest, anyone?). The consultants never delivered functional or deployable products. * Senior management that provides updates to seachange employees once a year whether it's needed or not (/sarcasm). Seriously, I hoped the CEO that was hired in November 2011 would actually lead and give the company direction and information regularly (which would have been a huge change over the previous CEO), but the new guy settled into the same pattern of silence. * IT department that makes infrastructure decisions based on minimizing the amount of work they will have to do, while the rest of the employees must suffer with unreliable, difficult to use network and software. The entire corporate culture of seachange is based on worshiping those in power. There is no accountability and no need to deliver on promises or do work. All you have to do to survive there is be an obsequious little zero. In the California, Acton and Ft. Washington offices of seachange there is no leadership, only a continuous scramble to cover the lies management and sales tell customers. The Eindhoven, Netherlands office of seachange was staffed by arrogant and incompetent hackers who could not create simple features for their software anything less than 6 to 12 months late, yet were never held accountable for the delays and shoddy quality of their products. If you are considering an offer from seachange, think very very carefully about it. The odds are you will regret ever hearing of seachange should you be unfortunate enough to be employed there.

Company is fragmented into multiple groups, mainly from acquisitions. No attempt to integrate the different groups. After 3 years there, I really had no idea where the company actually made it's money, there was that little communications. The In-Home group has absolutely no SW engineering process, no design, no QA, no coding standards, no reviews, no communications. Code is randomly written and checked in, leading to abysmal quality in company products. No effort was made to retain good employees. I joined through an acquisition, and over 3 years, they bleed the office dry, from 25 talented, experienced people, to 2 (and shrinking). There's a revolving door of CEO's. The previous 2 CEO's have both been entirely invisible to the employees, interested only in making things look good for the stockholders. They've provide no leadership, no vision, nothing. Who knows if the current one will actually bother to lead the company. The most recent CEO was fired, as was the last CTO. The last CTO was also invisible, providing no technical initiatives or direction.