software engineer - Software Engineer AVISTA (WI) Employee Review

Great work environment and paid overtime.

Benefits are okay. Nothing to write home about.

- You get to work on a great variety of work, disciplines, technology, and customers. The average project doesn't last long, so things are almost always fresh. - Good leadership opportunities. If you communicate well and don't mind stepping up, you will become a leader - the bar isn't high. - Your fellow engineers are great people to work and hang out with, if you make the effort to get to know them. - Tight knit environnment. - Decent work-life balance. - An agile mindset is present in some areas of the organization.

- Serious dysfunction at the highest levels of leadership. - Poor transparency and controlled messaging from the top down to middle management and engineers. - Poor sales/business acquisition team who are not held accountable and do not keep the company's backlog full of work, leading to layoffs. - Poor/uncompetitive pay and benefits when compared to tech organizations in nearby cities. - Significant number of people at every level who are not willing to change business processes in order to solve problems and increase efficiency. - Individuals who push for change are met with significant resistance. - Severe inability to attract talented engineers, due to the poor location of being in the middle of nowhere. - Ostensibly, raises are based on merit, but in practice, there is significant inconsistency in how merit is assessed, and is much closer to a tenure-based compensation system than a merit or outcome based system. - Myself and several other engineers at the organization have experienced problems with being paid properly, ensuring approved raises are put into effect, or even having approved raises revoked after taking effect, with no valid reason. Some of these instances were resolved amicably, some were not. - Inappropriate penny pinching when it comes to engineering expenditures compared to other departments. - Infrastructure issues that have remain unaddressed for years - leaky windows, poor/unbalanced HVAC performance, the use of old school phones. - Frequent claims of pivoting the business strategy throughout the years - but in execution, there is a complete lack of action from leadership to legitimately pursue business opportunities of even moderate risk, for example, marketing and selling a product already developed internally with a proven user base.