Consulting is more... - Senior Developer Allata Employee Review

In the backdrop of an eroding company culture, Allata continued to be a place where the company asked ever more of employees. 'Give us more' could be their corporate mantra. Indeed a common refrain was: 'consulting is more'. More indeed, more work and responsibilities for pay well below industry standard for the level of effort. Before you come to this company ask yourself, how important is your time? You have a limited amount of time available to you. Do you want to spend it hunched over a laptop putting in tons of extra hours for an ungrateful employer that you can rest assured will provide no reasonable compensation for all the ‘more’ you'll be asked to invest? To elaborate: - A sales driven culture where customers are sold project timelines I have to assume were never given to technical experts for even cursory review. As one individual put it: at Allata all the resources go into sales and delivery is left in the hands of God. - The sales process leads to the outcomes one might expect. A near constant state of crunch for some employees, failures to meet timeline or cost targets, customers becoming irate with cost and timeline overruns, or some combination of the above. This is, of course, always the fault of technical resources, never the people who sold the customer an impossible project in the first place. Management and sales are essentially beyond reproach / too big to fail. - The company prided itself on being a great place to work and having awesome work life balance. Since reality didn’t match up with what management wanted to be true, they performed some truly inane mental gymnastics to square the circle. When management knew someone was working overtime they would ask that all hours be entered so that they could address the problem. Then, when hours were entered accurately, people were berated for working so many hours and told they either did it to themselves or that their team wasn’t doing their part. This second issue conveniently ignored the fact that the teams were often full of Jr. devs or people with no experience in the stack being used. That along with the timelines ensured more Sr. developers had to take the tasks head on and assign easier work to the Jrs. or risk project failure (and the punishments that come with it). This led to an environment where people didn’t enter the real hours they worked and management could pat themselves on the back for having a great culture and work life balance. Circle successfully squared. - Transparency is a word that Allata executives liked to say often, presumably because they believed if they said they were transparent enough times people would stop realizing they aren’t. People were told ‘there are no consequences for speaking up in meetings and asking difficult questions’. However, for those of us in the know, there were countless examples of behind the scenes punishments and verbal lashings that happened for people who asked 'mean' or 'difficult' questions. - A broken performance review process that was closer to a game of telephone than a real review. Work outcomes came second to politics, how reviewers were feeling that day, the rumors that had filtered their way up the chain and other such drivel. The company turned what should have been peer reviews and a brief conversation with a manager into a multi-week slog which they somehow managed to bloat ever further as time went on. Despite reams of paperwork and other ceremony surrounding performance reviews the entire review outcome hinged on whether or not an executive liked / disliked / didn’t care about the work you had done. - An executive team with control issues that failed in every instance to delegate any power to mid and lower level managers (see performance reviews). Instead of empowering competent managers to promote and give pay raises to employees the executives, who were heavily disconnected from the day-to-day work efforts of employees, felt a need to be heavily involved in a process that they didn't have sufficient information to be competently contributing to.