ByWater Solutions Reviews

- “Leadership” is inadequate to the point of being comical. Repeatedly make bad and rash business decisions. They react based on rumors and inaccurate information instead of facts and data. - Horrible or zero communication skills from the top down. You will get flowery analogies, words put in your mouth or twisted, or pie in the sky ideations if you ask for clarification on how things are going to happen. - There is no plan in any of the departments except for Sales and none of the other department heads has the skill set to make a plan. They don’t see that as an issue. Reactive flying by the seat of your pants is not a business strategy to scale a company. - Lack of transparency and wishy-washy messaging - No help or support in onboarding, training, professional development - everyone is thrown to the wolves. They just started discussing an onboarding plan after 15 years in business. - People kept on staff way too long that bring others down. A few people do the workload of many. No accountability on performance. - New positions created out of thin air without posting them. They like to hire or promote buddies instead of following regular hiring processes. - You might show up to work and a whole position or valuable process might be eliminated because someone felt like it. There’s a staff-wide unease from all the change. - Huge disconnect between the decision makers and the people doing the work. - No one to go to for help or support. HR is not on staff side. - Concerns are regularly brought up that are ignored or dismissed. - Key people have started leaving. No one has quit for 2 years and now 5 people have left in 2 months. More are surely making their escape plan. These people left mainly due to two specific “leaders”. The company doesn’t care. You are disposable. - Trying to get new tools for over a year and still have no new tools. - Talked about AI and automations for over a year - there have been 0 improvements. - Tone and mood policing if you are not 100% a smiling and enthusiastic yes man (and preferably a man). Several male employees have thrown ego-based temper tantrums (including in front of customers) and that behavior is not corrected. - Customers are starting to notice. There is no one in charge that cares. They will only pay attention to obvious issues when a customer gets to the point of complaining and that call gets to them. - Pay is below industry standard. They know library workers are desperate to leave library setting and work remotely. No dental insurance.

ByWater is a family like any other—there are golden children that can do no wrong and scapegoats that will be blamed for the entire family’s problems even after they gather the courage to run away. May god have mercy should you (or your wider team) have the misfortune of ending up in the latter category. Be warned that it will be an uphill battle to avoid being scapegoated if you don’t work with the Koha product 99% of the time, although I should mention that I lucked out majorly on that front compared to some of my teammates. Don’t just take my word for it on being “family” either! When my competent manager and lead dev left the company this summer, higher ups wasted no time comparing us to their children by telling our colleagues that we were “pouting” and “yelled” at them when raising basic concerns about next steps in a normal tone of voice; I wonder if the same diction would have been used if the remaining team members weren’t all women. Before I left, things deteriorated to the degree that myself and a few others actively discussed two-party state recording laws because we were desperate to share what we thought were totally normal conversations with others for feedback (recording is a no-go, by the way). Here’s an amuse-bouche of some of the other things that I experienced at ByWater: • Getting in trouble for taking a team photo at staff retreat • COO that gaslights people about what he said to the point everyone has to keep receipts that he ignores if brought up • No shared financial numbers (even if you’re a c-suite member!) • Company-level goals all about NOT doing stuff and nothing else…??????? • Employing friends with no formal hiring process • General misogyny — they’ll use the fact that women make up the majority of library workers against you if you try to complain about it, too, all without any self-awareness that library leadership (like company leadership) is still predominantly men! • Previously absent coworkers showing up to open-source community meetings and embarrassing you by acting without regard to the needs, desires, or basic social comfort of the people that have been participating for years TL;DR: I knew what she was dealing with behind the scenes wasn’t pretty, but I did not realize just how much my manager/mentor was shielding me from the drama, chaos, confusion, and madness for the past two years. Before all this went down, I used to think that even winning the lottery couldn’t get me to part with my job at ByWater. Look at me now.