Yes, there is a reason "former employees" are exactly that - Anonymous employee Apptricity Employee Review

It's interesting seeing a particular individual on here running down all former employees as dishonest, poor performers, and constantly blaming others for their incompetence. If the company has trouble finding quality people to work there, the problem is with the individuals who hire and develop the talent. On the whole, Apptricity cares little about who they hire and even less about how they're developed. The main basis for hiring at Apptricity is whoever they can get for the least amount of money (around 20% under DFW market value is the preferred rate). Actual qualifications for the position are always secondary to this. I hired people for my department on a frequent basis during my nearly seven years at Apptricity. The direct instructions on hiring that I received from the CEO were to "get someone in here," anyone, it didn't matter. If they didn't work out, they'd be fired in 30 days and the company would hire someone else. And they're are complaining about not having quality employees? Really? I wonder what might be to blame for that? Despite this, the company did frequently attract and hire some individuals with real talent and real job skills. The problem is that Apptricity's "process" (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense) does absolutely nothing to place anyone involved in it in a position to succeed. Generally, projects at Apptricity are handled like this: The CEO returns from a trade show and calls a meeting to tell everyone that he talked to people at Company X and that these people told him they need Product Y. Apptricity doesn't have Product Y, has never previously considered investing resources into developing Product Y, and has little idea what it takes to develop a version of Product Y that meets market needs. However, the CEO has told the reps from Company X that Apptricity does in fact have Product Y and he's agreed to demo it for them in two weeks. The product group now has two weeks to create a mostly static demo of a product they know next to nothing about. Requirements for the demo are gathered by: 1. Referencing the short conversation the CEO had with reps from Company X 2. Trying to find someone in the company who has any experience working with a similar product or in a similar market space 3. Management's briefly scanning a couple of competitive products 4. Lots of talk from the execs about "If I needed a product like this, here's what I'd want in it," despite the fact that it's highly unlikely that any of them have any experience with such a product or the market it's meant to address, as most of them, including the CEO, are former sales reps. "Research and requirement gathering" is done while the product team is already working on the demo. Everyone is already putting in 80+ hour weeks due to the short timeframe and now they routinely have to go back and redo/re-scope the product because of the continually changing requirements gathered through the "careful vetting" done in steps 1-4 above. Next comes the demo. You can tell exactly how it went by how many people the CEO screams at when the sales team gets back to the office. On the occasions when the demos did go well, a new set of problems is created. First, Since the reps at Company X had no idea that Apptricity spoofed Product Y in two weeks and presented a largely static demo, they want to have the it implemented ASAP. Now, the execs have to try to stall as long as possible while the product team attempts to create a working product from what was shown to Company X. Generally, Apptricity is able to delay delivery for about 4-6 weeks. Second, the product team now has to build a functioning product. The demo presented has little back end code, no database (or a very minimal one, at best), and most of the UX from the demo is spoofed together to showcase only the functionality Apptricity wants to show. There's tons of dead links and pieces that don't actually do anything. Additionally, there may be lots of changes that are needed to what was shown in the demo. All of this now has to be built out into a coherent working product, despite the scant understanding anyone has of what it actually needs to accomplish in the real world. Development proceeds apace, with work weeks growing longer and longer as the delivery date approaches. Development usually stops 3-4 days before the date in which the product is to be delivered. Those last 3-4 days are reserved for QA and bug fixes (yes, you read that right ... 3-4 days). QA barely scratches the surface of what needs to be fixed and maybe 10% of what they find actually gets corrected before the product is declared complete and delivered. The customers at Company X then spend the next 6 months finding all of the unfixed bugs and missing functionality, which Apptricity's massive customer service development team then has to correct. During this time, the CEO screams frequently about how incompetent everyone in the company is, how he's the only person at Apptricity who cares at all, and opines about how he needs to fire everyone and start over. The next week, he's off at a new trade show and it's lather, rinse, repeat. So, all of that said, my question is this: Considering how the company works, exactly how can they tell which employees are good at their jobs and which ones aren't? The process is so hamfisted that it's impossible for anyone to do great work. It was this way the entire seven years I was there, and from listening to people who have worked there since I left, it's still that way. Nothing will ever change at Apptricity, because the execs don't care about delivering a quality product, don't care about hiring quality people, and have zero idea how to put the people they do hire in a position to succeed.