Dedicated to both libraries and staff - Department Head ByWater Solutions Employee Review

I've been with ByWater for over 14 years. I love working here, and it doesn't feel like work most days. I work with kind and helpful colleagues; the owners encourage feedback and the sharing of opinions. The owners are kind and not typical business owners. For example, they work on holiday weekends so the rest of the team can be with their families!

Sometimes, ByWater can be too accommodating.

- Lots of excellent coworkers - Software I'm proud to have worked on - Working with libraries is very rewarding

ByWater has (or maybe had - there is a bit of a mass exodus going on at the moment) a lot of very talented staff who care about libraries and who are a delight to work with. Unfortunately, management not only doesn't value expertise, but treats it with suspicion. Anyone who is good at their job and specializes in any way is treated as though they were plotting against the company. They are told they aren't sharing; they are being selfish. Management's idea to fix this problem of selfishness was to cancel all product-specific meetings and make everybody go to all the meetings. The end goal was to have no product-specific employees, even though ByWater's major products are highly complex and have limited overlap. Maybe this would have worked had there been a plan for intensive cross-training or even a recognition that there were things that people would need to learn about the other product before they could support it effectively. This did not happen. People were simply thrown into the deep end and management did not seem to particularly care whether they swam or gave up. The people who succeed at ByWater are the ones who don't care about doing their jobs well so they don't mind that management is constantly making that impossible. The majority, who do care, are overworked and miserable. Save yourself a lot of grief and look elsewhere.