Uptake Reviews

3.0

43% would recommend to a friend

(262 total reviews)

Adam McElhinney

56% approve of CEO

36% positive business outlook

Uptake has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 262 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Uptake employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

262 reviews
1.0
Jul 12, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* Decent Salary * Lunch room (when in the office) has snacks * Able to work from home throughout covid

Cons

The applications are riddled with tech debt that developers are trying to fix but it's never "fast enough". Every person is scrounging for a few remaining points to "squeeze their project in". When the developers try to push the company forward, we are forced to end up reverting any progress that we made because either an ex-developer (now product) decides it doesn't meet their very specific specifications, and that it must be home grown. During my time as a developer at Uptake I have been forced to on several occasions I've been forced to put my integrity as a developer aside to bend into the poor decisions of a person who is no longer supposed to be leading or guiding engineering. Priorities change faster than I can fathom, leading to some very remarkable silliness happening, and side conversations and almost side deals with developers. One person's way of "evolving the product/innovating" is by deprecating old crap code that they wrote. Because "if we don't innovate we will die" ... which the sentiment is true but I have a completely different view point about what innovation is. HR complaints fall on deaf ears because some of the biggest offenders are protected by senior management due to past experience. Overall - terrible code, any attempts to make it better are met with "it works so move on". Get out while you are still not employed by them. At the time of this writing, they are in the process of reverting completely back to the "Canam Way" which is write whatever crap you can to get it working and hope that it doesn't break anything when you do it.

1.0
Feb 4, 2021

Uptake Canada - chaotic organization

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The unlimited snack cupboard is about all that comes to mind.

Cons

1. Poor leadership - joining UC was single handily the worst decision I have made as a career. From day one it was nothing short of lies, deception, and disorganization. Having to navigate on a day-to-day basis a cold war between a team lead and department manager was not what I was expecting when I joined Uptake. The manager should have had enough sense to fire the team lead but seemed to timid to do what was necessary. Ultimately the poor working relationship between those two individuals was the reason I left. 2. Poor office locations in Mississauga with corresponding poor transit links. 3. Large amount of technical debt. Some development work was underway to modernize the application stack but it shows the overall lack of attention and vision prior to UC assembling the teams together. 4. Office culture. Mixed bag of stilted startup energy and stuck in the past mentality. An exec with a big tent personality would have gone a long way to helping the teams integrate together.

1.0
Jul 13, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Decent pay, lots of massive monolithic application riddled with bugs so you'll definitely always have work to do

Cons

No upgrading the stack, no clear direction about where the products are going, changing priorities by the minutes, assigning projects to engineering teams and then stripping them away after a few months of planning because other priorities

Viewing 1 - 3 of 262 Reviews

Glassdoor has 294 Uptake reviews submitted anonymously by Uptake employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Uptake is right for you.