Business Information Systems Reviews

I worked at BIS for just about two years. I came into the job with four years of industry experience and an excellent academic track record, and I was offered less than $30k. As much "success" as BIS apparently enjoys, as indicated by some reviews, it seems they would put more value in the people who create their software. Maybe I just felt "entitled" to fair compensation for my skills and experience... Here's the truth: only a select few get the benefits of whatever success the company has. That is to say, if you're a salesman, if you are management, or if you're friends with the CEO, you're in a good spot. If you're anyone else, don't even expect a pat on the back for hard work. In my two years at BIS, I consistently saw management shoot down good advice from experienced developers. I saw them blame developers for problems that management created. I saw them pander to bullying clients--some of whom never paid for their software--just to save face. How about the software itself? Some of it is built on codebases started when I was in high school (I'm 30). Remember VB6? Yeah, neither did I. Feel comfortable working in Ruby? PHP? C#? Well, that doesn't matter, because you won't be the one deciding what language is used. Someone else will decide it for you. As far as software engineering goes, forget it. There is no process. Most of the tickets you will work on are entered into the system by people who generally do not have a technical background. The process for these is "just get it done." Deadlines are set on a whim without any thought toward planning or project management. As you work, management will continually inject themselves into your workflow and constantly derail your efforts with consistently poor decisions. I mean, a single ticket for an entirely new software system should cover it, right? What's that, about two weeks? If you start working over to try to make up for these problems, you will be expected to continue doing that. If you stop, your work ethic will be questioned. If you make suggestions for better ways to do things, you will be met with, "This has always worked for us." If you question a software "spec," the CEO might suggest that he could spec the entire project on a whiteboard in five minutes (this actually happened to me). If your project happens to be successful based on the hard work of you and your team, the salesmen will get the credit for it. You won't get a bonus or a nice steak dinner, probably not even a "Hey, nice job." They will boast about giving "big raises" like it's a favor to you. These raises, like everything, are at the whim of the CEO. Seriously. Every single raise has to be approved by him, which is funny, considering he probably has no idea who you are or what you do on a daily basis. After two years there, I finally reached the salary I should have started at. When it came time for me to quit, after many of the developers had already jumped ship, the reaction from management was basically a collective shrug. BIS puts no value in your experience, skills, or knowledge--to them, you're just a person who can type. If you can type, you can program, right? I could go on and on and on, but I think the point is made. Do you want a career? Go somewhere else. If you need a job and want to work here to get a taste of the real world, by all means, go for it. Gives you some experience. But don't spend more than a year. Simply isn't worth your time.

The negatives of the company can be some pretty heavy ones at times. You’ll get two weeks vacation that you begin earning after 6 months but you’ll feel guilty about actually taking it. Reason being, the company has very tight deadlines and over promises on those pretty frequently. With that tight of deadlines, it can leave employees feeling guilty about taking their time off simply because they don’t want to put their team behind schedule. The company also has no defined PTO policy but usually will grant PTO for doctor’s appointments and various other things. However, just like with vacation, most people feel guilty about taking the time off so they will only take a few hours or a day at most. Medical insurance isn’t the greatest, despite what the company preaches in its yearly insurance meeting. For a single person it does okay, but for a family the price is “comparable to the national average” but the coverage you get for it just isn’t. Retirement match was only 3%, which I considered to be low but not a huge negative in the end. Really at the end of the day it all boils down to some good people stuck in really bad situations with their hands tied behind their back by the decisions of the company. The best part of it all is that you’ll be told that the salary is competitive for the area and when you factor in cost of living that you’d not be making any more money by moving to find another job. In the tech industry especially, that can’t be farther from the truth at this point. People are no longer locked to finding jobs just in their small area and even if they are, the industry grows by double digit percentages year after year. Overall, if you need starting experience as a developer then you take whatever dev position you can get at the company.