Disorganized management - plenty of busy work (reporting) and no innovation or improvement - Senior Software Engineer Sentara Health Employee Review

3.0
Jan 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good benefits for healthcare, personal needs - Very flexible when made aware of personal situations affecting employees - Good to gain knowledge and skills in field but very limited growth opportunities other than certs

Cons

- Very disorganized project management system, objectives that read well on paper but they don't seem to be able to talk down to the people implementing the objectives how to achieve them. - In IT, an unnecessary amount of time is spent on "time tracking" --- they want to know how much time is booked against the work going on and it's a headache for employees and especially management to have to fix. - Very siloed teams --- there is very little cross team communication and collaboration at times especially since most of IT is now remote since Covid. - Education is harder since we are not on the hospital side as nurses. They have tuition reimbursement but it's for very limited IT programs. It is hard to gain new education that is "important to the business" through the current offerings. They do have suggest LinkedIn Learning, but don't have that as a current employee benefit. I have been looking for over a year to understand the project management system at Sentara. There is none. In IT - ideas get submitted to change software/do stuff and either there is a deadline and all teams other work has to get interrupted to take care of this or there is no deadline and the can gets kicked down the road. We have "Agile" teams but the organization as a whole is not at all Agile. The Ideas I have seen are sometimes what would be considered an epic --- but the engineering teams get tasked with a story or release task or project task to complete the work. The development work may take some time to go through development and testing and there is a lot of back and forth about how we know a project is done and completed. They rely on the engineers/developers to essentially have the product management / project management skills to communicate about a particular project and get it done.

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Sentara Health Response
5mo
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about your experience at Sentara Health. We appreciate your recognition of our benefits and work-life balance. We also value your candid feedback regarding time tracking and have made HR aware of your feedback. Your input helps us grow and improve.

Explore other reviews about Sentara Health

5.0
Jul 5, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

flexible schedule and work from home

Cons

stressful accuracy and productivity standards

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Sentara Health Response
2d
Thank you for taking the time to share a helpful review about your position at Sentara Health! We are happy to hear that the flexible work arrangement has been beneficial.
2.0
Jul 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The team I was on was small but it had good people. My direct manager and her boss were great, but everyone above them were horribly disorganized and incompetent. More on that under cons. Pay was fine, slightly above the average. But raises were inconsistent. The ability to work from home was great. It was rare to be asked to work overtime, so work life balance was good.

Cons

Disorganized upper management who thought they knew better than the folks working in the weeds every day. There were multiple times that they would implement a change that my team would strongly recommend against, but it was shoehorned in anyway. Months later they would come back and say “that was actually a bad idea” and we would have to fix their mistakes, despite warning them against it in the beginning. How well you get trained also depends on your department. My team worked with other teams at Sentara that were often attempting to do things that could have put the company in legal jeopardy, but they were never told not to do it.

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