How many hours can you work in a week? What was your billable? Get hired by a client... They'll be sure you're fired. - Engineer Atomic Data Employee Review

1.0
Nov 8, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Get in, Get Experience, and Get Out!!

Cons

The management at this place feeds off of the CEO's fear-driven environment. The CEO looks at people as billable resources only. Their quarterlies meetings give awards out to people who bill clients this most. The CEO does not tie your compensation review with your yearly review so you won't receive a raise. If you do it won't be backdated and the CEO will wait months to approve it. His explanation of this is he knows what your market value is which he proudly states in his Atomic's Quarterly meeting. Which is funny because upper managements have no issue spending tons of money at Gala's instead of investing back into their employees. My only explanation of this is to keep the company looking good because of the TOXIC environment. The CEO, Jim Wolford runs around the office swearing at resources saying he knows better than them. The Directors at this company are chosen primarily because they can handle his attitude and explaining to client's why their bill is as high as it is. People are better off getting more money at another company and buying their own MN United tickets. The company "gives" you your vacation for the full year and if you quit tries to deny you the time under their use it or lose its policy. I've known NUMEROUS people who were great resources and because they were not a billable resource got laid off. They invest in entry people knowing they will get cheaper labor and have a great knack for finding resources who can get the job done. They will expect you to bill your FULL 40 hours leaving you no time to work on your career which you won't have because you'll be worried about what clients you can bill no matter what you're doing... Meaning you'll be spending 20 hours outside of work working on your career advancement. Make sure that the 20 hours aren't spent freelancing. The CEO, Jim Wolford has talked with numerous resources about working on freelance and how you'll be fired if you get caught. Although if you want to learn something without freelancing you better find an ATOMIC client who wants to pay for it so you can continue your billable. The CEO has agreements with clients so if you get a job at another company which is a client of Atomic's they will make the company fire you. This has happened numerous times and the CEO boasts about this during the company's meeting. Atomic pushes dedicated servers because they cost a ton of money and not because they are the best solution for their clients. Often time leaving clients paying 500-600 dollars a month per server more then what they need. If you want to get cloud experience here you will be getting dedicated on-prem experience. The company boasts they are more secure then Amazon and Azure and the employees know that's a complete joke. There is no way Atomic has the funding to even compete with Microsoft or Amazon. Previous people who have worked there describe leaving it as getting out of an abusive relationship, See Glassdoor review. The company meetings show the top 100 clients and tell you that's who you should be spending your time on. The Company boasts about having low turnover on client's which is a COMPLETE FABRICATED METRIC. This is just a tactic to get clients to think they're good at keeping clients. This doesn't matter if the top client is a client that pays you to push a button every 15 minutes. They relate your IT time to that of Attorneys and suggest finding a way to work on more clients instead of improving your career. The CEO hires and buys new companies to expand their client base and then fires the business owner that got brought in but is happy to continue business with the clients. Engineers will not be dealt with. People who are problems at this company will not be dealt with if they keeping billing. There are numerous individuals in the software department who farted everywhere nothing was ever done about it. So if you have an issue with someone there is no way they will do anything about it because they value the companies billable over your work environment. If you're not a billable resource you'll be last on the list to get recognition. THIS REVIEW ON GOOGLE IS 100% ACCURATE AND NOT JUST ONE CLIENT'S EXPERIENCE: Laura Sinkfield - 1 review a year ago "We arranged to have Atomic Data do a major IT transition for our rather large growing company. The initial quote came in at roughtly $15,000 on the low end (according to them most likely), and just over $19,000 on the high end. To date, through our first four months of service, our bills have totalled Month 1: $63,727.23, Month 2: $45,762.98, Month 3: $58,872.16, Month 4: $51,154.43. I am actually quite nervous what month five is going to bring. After meeting with them to try to find a solution, they did very little but imply that there was nothing they could do about it. They based our quote on entry level IT staff (the help desk), who wasted hours of staff time, as they were not able to handle the situations. Therefore escalating to their "high level" engineers, which charge at a significantly higher rate. I think if you have rather simple IT needs, this may be an ok company under those circumstances. If you need an IT company who stands behind their word with integrity, I highly recommend looking elsewhere. Our experience is beyond disappointing. Be very careful of any quote they give you because it can be very misleading. If I could give them zero stars, I would. "

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Atomic Data Response
6y
We appreciate your candid feedback here, though we must point out that many of these statements are factually incorrect. For example, engineers have no visibility into client retention metrics (which are in fact extremely low) so your claim that the metric presented internally is fabricated is simply untrue. Our charitable contributions are based on decisions made by the Charitable Giving Committee, not by managers as you state, and in no way do those contributions take away from our investments into the company or resources. In fact, a significant portion of these contributions go directly to employees in need and the causes championed by our clients. Your statements about career development are equally unfounded. Many employees have gone from entry level to management, team leads, supervisors, and more. Also see our significant and continual investments in training and the Atomic Academy program. In regards to acquisitions, Atomic Data has not acquired a single company in the past 5 years, so once again your statement about buying companies for their clients is objectively untrue. Atomic Data is a service company and our staff are hired first and foremost to serve our clients. Career development is important, but serving our clients must always be the priority. Surely your career was advanced and you had positive experiences if you stayed with the company for three years. Finally, the idea that only billable resources receive recognition is simply laughable; half of those staff recognized at the last meeting were non-billable resources and this is typical. For those reading this, please keep in mind that disgruntled employees are always more likely to relay biased, negative opinions (not facts).

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