Amateur and Derisive - Anonymous employee Pica9 Employee Review

Everything I say in this review is just my opinion. I hope what I say here benefits the company down the road and it's only because I value this company so much I'm willing to be honest. Sometimes the best lessons are the hardest ones to hear. I'm very skeptical of the existing reviews. Very few people at the company would actually endorse them in a sober state. They sound oddly like something management itself would put forward. The management style here is very immature. The fiefdom of management is a vacuum of decision making that is often out of sync with reality and clearly separates themselves from others. Management has even gone as far as advising people to "choose sides" which I found alarming. When a plan is laid out that doesn't conform with budgeting, premature estimates, or a manager's notions you are simply forced into going with a kludge. Beware the words "for now" - the company is built on a heap of "for now"'s. Planning here is frustrating at best. It's made worse by the low level of sophistication at this company. The "senior" planners are largely ignorant of how things should actually be done. Management makes this worse by not understanding how to better their skills or augmenting them by hiring more skilled employees. After each release nightmare the company marches on victoriously. Naturally both business and software are developed during these marches however the quality and vision of these developments are severely lacking. In the long run the unsustainability of this bad code and the depressing user experiences will not lead to anything I would have been proud to be a part of. Change is only accepted in lip service. It is never actualized. That was one of the main problems I had with this company. Sometimes I feel you have to admit you have a bad approach especially when the empirical evidence is making it clear. I never saw this done. Instead new projects would be taken on and implemented in the same slipshod manner. No real planning, no real testing, no real QA - no real production schedule - changes up until the last second. Lastly the CEO has a history of getting very angry with people to the point where it's become a running joke in the company. He's involved in absolutely every plan that is made and often aggressively enforces his ideas. He operates on confirmation bias alone and it's only during ephemeral moments of lucidity that he realizes he's may have been going about it all wrong. It's during these times his grace and humility shine through. Sadly the managers below him fold like chairs once he begins these tirades which always meant we were heading towards yet another bad implementation. I wanted to work at a forward looking and passionate software company. Instead I ended up working where mediocre software goes to die. To make matters worse the somewhat open atmosphere I started working in had been usurped by the cheap imitation of a tightly run corporate ship. It's purely a facade though. Professionalism takes more than policies and an empty smile. I would recommend this company for anyone who is looking for disenchantment and fake platitudes.