Emerald Associates Reviews

The CEO is the first negative and the primary reason I left. Nicole (the CEO) micromanaged and used aggressive and intimidating tactics to try and "drive success". Little did she know that those tactics were discouraging people from coming to work or even being around her. Because of her there is a revolving door of employees at the company - many don't last more than a few months and even fewer last more than a year. Development safety nets were few (no unit tests, no testing policy, etc) and the primary source of development correction I got was from the seniour dev which was consistently without much regard for the human being he was talking to. There seemed to be a hiring direction of "get software developers - they can do everything". Though that may be true (they can do support, installation, hardware stuff, etc) they don't _want_ to - we educated ourselves for _software development_, not support - and certainly not client-facing tasks (which are given to developers all the time; especially new ones because they're cheap). Hours were long and grueling as were the tasks and torment from the CEO. She only trusted one individual there (and he wasn't even her husband) and insulted everyone else - openly. Even in meetings. She even insulted clients in large webex or phone meetings. No wonder there's no success. Almost regularly the CEO and management (who are her family) got into aggressive verbal disputes. Many of those resulted in name-calling, put downs, and entirely unprofessional behaviour. During my time there I experienced two of those arguments become physically violent. The first time they locked themselves in a room after the verbal portion got really bad. Then us software devs closed our door (directly across the hall from theirs) because it was still extremely loud. Moments later someone stormed out of the room was quickly followed by a flying coffee cup (with coffee and cream inside) which smashed into our (thankfully reinforced) glass door. The second time the CEO and her brother were arguing at length with their door open. After quite some time the CEO stormed out and the other manager threw the door shut with all his might which broke the door frame and sprayed glass shards all over the hallway and into the dev's office space. I was exhausted at the end of every day just from the environment. With my increase in wages from the previous job I spent the difference almost entirely on stress relief through alcohol. Never before have I been so intensely stressed for such a prolonged period of time that I developed wrinkles on the inside of lips. I never know that was possible.