Culture of Politics - Anonymous employee SevOne Employee Review

* Constantly changing management * Rampant favoritism and cliquishness * VPs micromanage the rank-and-file * Departments don't work together well * Resistance to good/necessary change * Product is weak and going downhill SevOne is in the middle of the worst growing pains I've ever witnessed or heard about. Half of the senior management acts like this is still a tiny company being run out of a garage. The other half treats the company like it's a 20,000-employee behemoth that can't be changed except at a glacial pace. Mid-senior management is a revolving door of people who spend about a year trying their best to solve problems and then leaving when they realize that they're never going to get anything productive done because the original leadership would rather listen to their favorite employees. The core product is inelastic, and very little progress has been made on it in the past two years. It desperately needs to be re-architected and separated into modules, but the department in charge of that is still too concerned with safeguarding their legacy to admit the extent of the work that needs to be done. The product is full of hacks that probably seemed clever at the time, but have made extending or improving the current product very difficult. There is a staggering reliance on a single open-source product for almost every piece of our core functionality. We frequently reinvent the wheel instead of using available open-source tools, often because our Linux distribution is >6 years old and can't even compile the third party libraries. And when a group makes a change to any part of the product, it often breaks the entire toolchain for the rest of the company for days at a time because the entire product is processed as a monolithic entity despite having twenty or so separate teams working on it. Despite all of these product problems, management has resisted the all-hands-on-deck effort that would be required to split the product into manageable pieces, apparently because of the message that would send about their confidence in our strategy. Product management has been non-existent for the past 6 months during a leadership transition, so the product direction has been a combination of inertia and a contest of wills between people who know very little about the market. The relationship between PM and Architecture is fractured at best, because Architecture's leadership sees itself as the "true" direction of the product. The sales and marketing organizations do a remarkable job dragging the rest of the company up the growth curve we've enjoyed for so long. But this is not a good place to work if you want to be involved in the technology side of things. There's no room for innovation or original thinking, and all too often, since internal tools and infrastructure break down on a biweekly basis, there's not even room for hard work and accomplishment. Most employees are aware of these issues, but some of them have spoken out in the past and been effectively blackballed by senior management for their "lack of trust." Some of the most talented employees have already left as a result. This mood has crept into company-wide communications as well, with the overall tone increasingly indicating that the company doesn't trust its employees to make good decisions about much of anything. This has led to a state of "sullen silence," where black humor in the trenches is a daily occurrence, but outwardly a pretense of obedience and enthusiasm is maintained to keep from ending up in the doghouse. Despite Glassdoor's policies about anonymity, many are afraid to review the company because they worry management will "guess" their identity and add them to the blacklist. A lot of amazing work was done to get SevOne to this point. And a certain set of personalities and abilities were helpful for getting it there. But if those personalities can't see that their roles need to change as SevOne pushes past 600 employees, and that the company needs product leaders who have the freedom and responsibility to make good decisions on their own, then this company will never be able to evolve past the startup phase. If SevOne is still growing 2 years from now, it will probably be a sign that it has made some of the changes necessary. As of now, however, it doesn't look terribly likely.