Poor pay long hours but great ping-pong - Systems Architect RuleTek Employee Review

2.0
Oct 24, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people who work there are great and it is a fun work environment, in the brief moments in which your project is not on fire.

Cons

The pay is well below industry standards for programmers and pega professionals, and unless you take on a leadership position you salary will not ever meet industry standards. Most people stay for a year, realize that the promised pay opportunities probably wont happen and then leave. How much you work is entirely dependent on what state the project you are working on is. A handful of projects the developers rarely work more than 40 hours per week, but most projects have prolonged periods of distress in which developers routinely work 60 hours per week. Why certain projects go south is hard to say, but what I observed is that a lack of senior developers of teams led to poor quality. Teams were comprised of mostly new developers with little experience, with one or two senior developers who are expected to keep quality up and act as mentors. But the senior developers have so much other responsibility and are so outnumbered by junior developers, that the resulting code is bugging and/or isn't what the client asked for. Eventually the client notices and wants everything fixed and deadlines have to be met, so everyone works crazy overtime. To make things worse is that Korby's views this situation as entirely the fault of the developers, berates everyone and never acknowledging this pattern. On the project I was on, when things hit the fan, his solution was to add additional developers who had just finished training to our team. They inevitably created more defects and the project just got even worse. While I was there work schedules were very inflexible. You were expected to be at the office from 7 to 4 no matter what, working a couple extra hours one day so that you could leave early for a doctors appointment another was not an option. In fact while I was there, it was company polity that if you needed to leave early or come in late, even if it was just an hour, you had to take a half day of vacation. Thankfully my team lead did not enforce this, but this policy made the employees feel like they weren't trusted. Pega itself is a mixed bag. While it is a great tool for developing BPM software, as a skill it has limited applicability. Not many companies use Pega and the skill of using Pega isn't widely applicable, so you may spend years working there developing skills that can only be applied at a handful of companies.

Explore other reviews about RuleTek

5.0
Jun 1, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pingpong to release stress is great

Cons

Heavy learning curve and overly critical of work

1
2.0
Sep 7, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Workplace is full of nice people

Cons

The pay sucked the job sucked and the CEO was a tyrant

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