Pros
I don’t know if I’ve ever worked around a group of people with the knowledge and work ethic many of my coworkers had at Velocitor. Day in and day out, you were surrounded by hard working individuals with a wealth of knowledge, eager to share that with you to help you become better at what you do. That’s not to say everyone met that mark, but at one point most of the employees were dedicated, intelligent, honest, and generous with their time and their knowledge. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those people have left the company over the past year or two, leaving a staff of apple polishing yes-men and women, afraid to say no to the co-owners, and content to jockey the coattails of the few competent employees left while spouting buzz words in a vain attempt to hide the fact that they have no idea what they’re doing or talking about.
Cons
Many of the reviews I’ve read on Glassdoor appear very spiteful and angry, and in truth those individuals have every right to be sour about their experience at Velocitor. The atmosphere is extremely volatile thanks almost entirely to the co-owners. While most successful business owners lead through competence, loyalty, foresight, and respect, these owners command through lies, fear, denigration, and intimidation. It’s commonplace to hear the executives adamantly blame former employees for issues within the software and within the company while in the same breath claim they don’t like to talk bad about anyone. Being condemned as the cause of the failures of the company – typically referred to as a “cancer” by the executives – isn’t just probable once you leave the company, it’s become downright expected. The co-owners are the root cause of the issues at Velocitor. I can’t speak to any of the claims made on a personal level against the CEO and COO, however on a professional level I can say that if you work for or even work with this company, you will be lied to. If you work for Velocitor, you will also be expected to lie for them, as the company’s business model is 20% development of software and hardware solutions, and 80% development of deception. Every employee that has interacted with a customer has lied to them in one way or another. Employees are instructed to deceive clients for various reasons whether that’s regarding bugs, timelines, fixes, cost, etc., but when called on it, management will inform you that it’s not lying, it’s putting a spin on the situation. The CEO and COO have both made claims about various things only to contradict those months down the road. That’s the problem with telling an abundance of lies: it gets hard to keep them all straight. The owners have created an environment of fear to the point where employees are afraid to speak up about the littlest things, whether that be a suggestion of how the company could do better or even just a clarifying question during a meeting when someone uses an acronym they’ve never heard before. If you speak up, ask questions, or offer any form of dissent, you will be belittled in front of your peers at best and fired at worst. The owners once called a meeting to tell everyone that if they weren’t happy for any reason, to leave. Not to help make the place better, not to inform management of what’s wrong and why people were unhappy, not to suggest ways to improve the environment so everyone would be happy, but to just leave the company outright. Because of this, so many issues within the company are ignored while the blame for its failings is shifted onto easier targets. The people that are favored by management are yes-men and women who will toe the company line, as the CEO will openly profess his love for loyalty and respect but offer none in return. Talking a big game is the most important tool for success at Velocitor; competence is not necessary as long as you can pretend to know what you’re talking about and deflect questions to topics you are more comfortable discussing. As long as management’s ego is stroked and you can deflect responsibility for anything perceived as negative onto someone or something else, then management will adore you. Unfortunately for most, this can only last so long because things get complicated very fast. Standards vary from employee to employee based on the executives' opinions of them at that time, so some will put in forty hours of real work while others will log fifty hours of getting nothing accomplished. Typically the one who put in the most hours, regardless of what was produced, will be favored as “hours = productivity” in the minds of management. At one point a “contest” was held to see what development team could log the most hours with a requirement of forty-five hours per person per week. Numerous members of the development staff where looked down upon for only logging forty hours a week, yet they were producing double the amount of work as the people logging over fifty hours a week. Again, it’s all in talking a big game and playing to the hubris of the owners. That is what makes you “rock star” in their eyes. Velocitor has multiple applications performing the exact same functions but built entirely different from one another, making the job of a developer arduous and unnecessarily demanding. Because one application performs a somewhat similar function as another app, management will assume the code is interchangeable and expect developers to instinctively know how to work on something they’ve never seen before. Junior developers are hired and assigned to brand new projects with little to no direction or leadership, typically resulting in them being fire a few months later. This leaves the senior developers with the task of picking up the applications they were working on and being expected to have some form of precognition to predict what the last guy did wrong and what will break next. Even if a developer has a successful track record of 99.9%, they will still be criticized and scolded for errors in the tens of thousands of lines of code they didn’t write simply because they didn’t spot a single mistake buried in the application after it was dropped into their lap with no documentation. That doesn’t even cover the lack of business and functional requirements, which are rarely if ever created for a project. The COO/co-owner will just make a Windows-98-esque design in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and expect you to improvise on things he either didn’t consider or flat out forgot about. If you miss an issue that wasn’t addressed in the design, batten down the hatches because life will probably get a lot rougher for you. The solutions offered by the company are archaic and convoluted. Many apps are written for antiquated mobile devices with outdated operating systems using obsolete coding languages. “Solutions” are consistently sold to customers on ancient devices not because it best fits the needs of the customer, but because Velocitor and its sales representatives will make more of a commission than they would if they sold a newer, more proven device such as an iPad or iPhone. If the application is web-based and doesn’t work on a newer browser, users are told to try older versions of Internet Explorer without an ounce of derision. This is either because they don’t want to fix it or they just don’t know how. Developers are consistently told to do things “cheap and quick,” even if it’s not the right solution, so the company can make more money off of the project. This wouldn’t even be something they would have to deal if unrealistic promises weren’t made to clients, but that’s almost impossible when sales will promise anything just to make their commission even if it will ultimately lose the company money. The sales team would promise an application that cures cancer, works across every known mobile OS, and will be ready in two weeks if it means putting more money in their pocket. This isn’t done entirely out of greed, however. It’s also done because sales and management have a fundamental lack of understanding about what it takes to design, develop, test, and deploy a functioning solution. This becomes most evident when you consider sales and sales engineers never attend any meetings where the actual products are discussed on a technical level, so they have no idea what can and cannot realistically be accomplished. Security on the solutions they offer are laughable to a developer and potentially terrifying to a customer. A quick server test performed today on the SSL Labs website will provide an “F” rating on practically every velsol URL. This includes their mobile device management/remote control tool that allows an individual access to devices out in the field. The company advertises itself as PCI compliant, but that’s pure lip service. Developers have found multiple threats to data security and reported them to management only to be ignored. One of their biggest sites was hacked years ago and despite being alerted to it by developers repeatedly, management has never taken any steps address it. Velocitor has no long term plan. God willing, one day they might. But right now they only look to the short term. Priorities don’t just change daily, they can change hourly, further hindering development’s ability to finish projects correctly and on time. They want the quick gain for the least amount of work. They skip steps thinking the pieces will just fall into place on their own, often underestimating the importance of those steps. They continue to refer to developers as the "smartest people in the room," yet refuse to take their advice if it dissents in any way from their own. They choose to ignore problems until they have started to spiral out of control. They refused to give raises to good developers for years citing buggy code created by other, less capable developers. They’re hemorrhaging quality resources because of their pride, going through remarkable directors, managers, and developers like disposable paper towels. Nothing worth having is ever as quick and as easy as you think, and if they keep up like this I can’t imagine that company having a future in its current state.
