CN Reviews

It was a decent place to work a few years ago, but recently a new change in management has soured things, specially in the IT department. Three different CIOs in as many years, and each of them with their own view on how to modernize/manage IT. They stopped caring for the employee and now they are treated as an expense. Lack of motivation to come to work, they just want you to be at the office for 40 hours, work life balance in the gutter, no WFH policies in this day and age. They’re now trying to outsource everything offshore and career advancement has slowed to a crawl (i.e. no training unless you know the right people). Massive layoff of employees, losing years of experience and knowledge just to cut expenses to satisfy shareholders so they don’t muddle their precious key indicators. Such conditions and micromanagement are causing a mass exodus from the company, people leaving for greener pastures and serve them right. They show how little they care on those PR copy/paste responses to the reviews. Talking to management doesn’t do much, at all. The few ones who care have their hands tied by the upper echelons and the rest don’t give a hoot. Project management is complete hell, they bring an army of consultants to hack some solution as quick and as cheap as possible and then leave it to permanent staff to deal with the fallout and try to support a messy application.

Look at how the Glassdoor ratings for the CN IT department has plummeted over the last two years (from 3.5 stars in 2018 to 2.5 stars currently), and you'll have a feeling of how things are going. Been at CN for over 6 years, and in the past three year we started seeing a shift in the management style and it started to feel like IT was no longer valued at the corporate level. Instead it was being treated as an expense that needed to be minimized. Management style and direction keeps shifting, as the last 2 CIOs did not last more than 2 years each. Recent layoffs decided by upper management resulted in valued IT employees being removed from underneath managers without prior consultation. IT employees were being treated as disposable and no effort was made in trying to boost employee morale. We saw significant cost cutting initiatives in the IT department and investment in employees was reduced to bare minimum (e.g. increasing costs to IT Christmas Parties, Activity days, cutting of the Bravo recognition program and no celebration of delivery milestones). Work culture took a turn for the worse as we were forced to deliver more with less, and often with impossible timelines that resulted in overtime work during long weekend holidays and solutions being designed during implementation. Quality of work was being tossed to the side, and it was difficult to find any pride what we do. Large influx of new projects and technologies were being handed to contractors while project management and structure was poor. Low quality work was delivered due to impossible delivery timelines, and once the contractors left, permanent staff was left to deal with the chaos.