Troubling future ahead if corrections aren't made - Anonymous employee Health Catalyst Employee Review

2.0
Nov 8, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The pay and benefits were good and I enjoyed working with some of the people. I enjoyed the team parties that we had every so often.

Cons

The company is too remote and I didn't feel like I was a part of a team. Many people work from home and the only interaction with the team is during a 15 min standup meeting. There's less a feeling of connectedness and collaboration with your team when all of your work is done remotely. A major part of a great workplace is being able to interact with great people. When you get stuck doing Webex/Slack meetings as the majority of your interaction, it really eats away at that "Great Workplace". While working at the company I felt there was a real lack of diversity in the way people think. It very much feels like it's a yes person culture, and if you are an outside thinker you'll experience issues here. On several occasions I brought up concerns I had with the way an implementation was going or with the performance of a product, and most concerns I felt were ignored. At Health Catalyst, I don't feel like you can bring up alternative views/designs without causing problems. The best way to describe how things are done is with the word groupthink. Instead of providing critical feedback on ideas, people tend to just build on top of ideas that haven't been thoroughly explored. If you try to provide alternative ideas during a discussion others will think you're trying to sabotage others. I've read through other reviews, and I'm glad I wasn't the only person who has experienced this. One review that I really connected with was the following: "Another contributing factor that is discussed around the watercooler is the overly submissive yes-person culture created by the over-emphasis on "humility" as a core value. Bad ideas thrive in this environment because few challenge ideas." While the company may be doing well on the analytic side I feel they are struggling on the web development side. There seems to be a real lack of knowledge in how to use the tech stack chosen which has lead some projects to becoming quite brittle and fragile. These are very young projects(under 3 years) and it left me worried with how much tech debt they had already accrued. My worry is that many of these projects will be slow to adjust to clients needs/wants because of the poor design decisions or lack thereof. I'd also noticed that many people were leaving the company around the time that I left, and that should be concerning for management. While the pay and benefits are good, they aren't enough to keep me where engineers can't feel safe to provide critical feedback and when the company has a questionable future with web apps.

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Health Catalyst Response
7y
Thank you for sharing this feedback. One of the positives of responding directly to each Glassdoor review, for me as the CEO, is that it is one way to stay connected to "unfiltered" feedback, which can be very helpful. We have a few other mechanisms to try to help us receive "unfiltered" feedback, including our semi-annual Gallup surveys of every team member, and then many skip-level 1:1s and small-group discussions that I and other members of our leadership team participate in throughout each year. I try to hold approximately 100 skip-level 1:1s each year, and mostly just listen to what's going well and then proactively ask about what my colleague feels we should consider changing about any aspect of the company. There will always be opportunity for improvement. We will never be at a point as a company where there isn't a list of items we need to address in order to become better. What is critical, from my perspective, is encouraging, systematically, the unfiltered feedback to be shared, so that we can understand and then address those items that need to be addressed. This, to me, is a correct application of the attribute of humility -- most critically to be modeled by leaders who encourage feedback on what we need to improve, rather than shutting that feedback down. Related to this, I want to validate the feedback you shared about the incorrect application of the attribute of humility. I have heard this feedback from multiple sources, and it has reinforced the importance of us clarifying and reinforcing our message and training. This includes a reinforcement that humility is most important in our leaders -- particularly in their openness to new, even opposing ideas, and their encouragement of receiving feedback from their teams on areas of needed improvement. It is absolutely critical that these leaders foster, and do not discourage, openness to multiple diverse points of view, and to the concept that they can learn from each of their colleagues and teammates, which requires that they not shut down contrary ideas. It's also critical for every team member to live the operating principle of courageous transparency -- when they believe an alternate voice needs to be heard, it is crucial that they share that perspective, courageously! We will work to reinforce this, including during today's All Team Member meeting, where we'll specifically review, as a company, your feedback, and talk about it together. Next, relative to our buildout of web apps, this is a relatively new area for the company, so I agree that we need to carefully monitor our performance here. I have been pleased to see the number of installations of some of our most popular web applications, now at dozens of our existing clients. We will make utilization of these applications a major focus for 2019. Finally, regarding turnover, I also pay close attention to this metric, and we'll share the data today in our All Team Member meeting, as we always do, from our most recent board meeting two weeks ago, which includes our "people" slide, with data on our trailing-twelve-month turnover rate for everyone to see. It is a critical part of our mission to attract and then retain talented team members, and we will always have room for improvement here. The data that we'll review together today shows that the company has maintained a voluntary turnover rate between 6.7% and 8.4% during the past twelve months, with October coming in at 6.9%. This voluntary turnover rate compares quite favorably (less than half) vs. industry averages, but still highlights opportunity for us to improve. I am sorry that it didn't work out for you to stay at Health Catalyst and continue to contribute to the company's mission and success. We will work hard to address the issues of openness to different points of view, of strengthening our web apps and retaining our team members. And I wish you success in your future endeavors! Best, Dan

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Pros

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Cons

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Pros

Great Talent & Culture: The people here are highly capable, collaborative, and committed to helping each other succeed. The partnership between onshore and offshore teams works well and is a real strength. There’s a culture of grit and stability that has helped the company navigate multiple major transitions over the years. Mission-Critical Engineering: The work involves complex data infrastructure that requires deep technical expertise. It can be demanding, but seeing these systems run successfully and support real-world operations is consistently rewarding.

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Wage Compression and Retention Risk: Compensation for tenured and high-performing staff has not kept pace with the market for specialized data engineering and support leadership. In practice, tenure can feel undervalued or even penalized. This creates risk around losing institutional knowledge and operational continuity. Stagnant Career Progression: Contrary to stated expectations, strong performance ratings do not consistently translate into meaningful, market-aligned compensation growth. The process of how compensation is benchmarked lacks clarity in practice, obscuring how compensation decisions are made and what is required to advance.

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