Frustrating Place to Work - Senior Software Developer Aquatic Informatics Employee Review

1.0
Sep 18, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lots of good people and great location

Cons

A few people are extremely grumpy, overly analytical and anal-retentive to the point that its impossible to get anything done. Day to day work is dictated by the grumpy few. Analysis paralysis! No architect and so the software architecture is hugely inefficient. Software development is too slow. Overly focuses on clean code without any focus on business value or architecture. There is this false belief in the office that the work they are doing is saving the planet, but really its just helping people make money and sell more water. There is another false belief that the software is complex because the equations are complex, but this isn't true either. The software is unnecessarily complex.

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Aquatic Informatics Response
10y
Thanks for your review. We did indeed hire a SW Architect in January 2015 as well as a Team Lead for our new Water Quality product. As we’ve grown a lot over the last few years, we’ve taken various measures to support this growth – including more decentralized decision-making within scrum teams. We recently did an anonymous employee poll of the dev team, and feedback was very positive – people said they are feeling empowered and encouraged to make their own decisions. Yes, writing good code is important to us, but not at the expense of slowing down development. People here come from many walks of life and have diverse perspectives. It’s true, many of us do really believe that we are helping to make things a little bit better (while still running a successful business), and it’s one of the things people say they like about working here. Saving the planet… that’s a little beyond our mandate :)

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5.0
Jan 15, 2026
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CEO approval
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Pros

Great team, benefits, and flexibility to build your own schedule. Targets are within reach

Cons

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3.0
Sep 23, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Remote, good benefits, great work life balance. If you want a very low stress software job with very well defined success metrics, this is a fantastic place to work.

Cons

Accountability is focused on process following rather than results. Sprint velocity is far more important than creating a well functioning product. Additionally, there is massive architectural tech debt from long ago. It is improving now, but much remains.

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