Aviture Reviews

transparency, leadership or mentorship, and expectations

Compensation. This is an extraordinarily problematic part of Aviture's business. In recent years, several long-time engineers have left Aviture over its compensation structure or lack thereof. Talking directly to the CEO affords you the best chance of increasing your salary, since all compensation decisions are made at the sole discretion of the CEO and CFO. This is entirely by design. Aviture doesn't provide predictable salary increases, and performance evaluations are a black box, especially regarding how they impact compensation. It's not uncommon for effective engineers to be denied fair-market salary adjustments year-over-year, something I witnessed many times during my employment. Professional development. Dedicated mentorship is very hard to come by at Aviture, due to a lack of engineering managers attached to projects. If you're seeking mentorship, you'll need to actively solicit it, and precious few projects have leads who are able to put together a plan for you (or have the time to do so). Coaching. Coaches are a sad lot, and it's not their fault. They often assume many of the responsibilities of an engineering manager without any of the context necessary to perform the role well. They can't provide valuable feedback on your performance, effectively negotiate compensation on your behalf, or provide you a personalized professional development plan based upon their assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. Weekly reports. At the end of each work week, every Aviture employee is required to document their week in a public forum - discussing the week's challenges and whatever musings they like. At another company, you might tell these things to your engineering manager so they can track your progress against professional goals you've both agreed upon. Alas, this too is another end-run around the idea of installing effective managers and delegating leadership responsibilities. Culture. I'm not convinced there's much substance to Aviture's culture. A lot of the successful cultural values of software development are not widely practiced. Things like: encouraging calculated risk-taking, maintaining and enforcing high quality standards, or embracing big ideas and transformations. Aviture's own values aren't well fleshed out and tend to be slapped over any and all kinds of achievement, big or small. "Create impact" is a usual suspect in that regard. Some things Aviture already does could eventually be cultivated into real cultural norms. For example, Aviture's volunteer time off benefit and their engagement with Girls Inc. and JDRF could materialize into a larger cultural value around local community action. On the other hand, some cultural norms should be discarded. Aviture shouldn't strive to "make [their clients] look away." That action often takes the form of presuming or preempting a client's business needs. It should, instead, simply consider the patterns, technologies, and architectures best suited to solve a client's problems. Lastly, I will say some of the criticisms mentioned in other reviews around diversity are fair. I won't rehash them, just confirm them.