A Good Place to Work - Implementation Manager Axis Clinical Software Employee Review

The primary product has a very loyal following from a core set of customers. Laid back work atmosphere, no micro management. Decent benefits. A handful of great people that were great to work with. Good free coffee and food on fridays. Occasional company events that are fun.

Leadership seems to have no idea what is going on with subordinates. Multiple times I found myself saying "I can't fix a problem I don't know about". Even when management does know of an ongoing problem with an employee, they seem unwilling on unable to correct the problem. I was subject to constant unprofessional and disrespectful conduct from the lead customer service engineer. Several personnel gaps, and some positions have been vacant for 6+ months. Some departments are severely understaffed. The product is not QA'd thoroughly enough, and regression testing is not preformed. Every software release is accompanied by dozens of bugs, often crippling core program functionality. "there's a patch for that" is a common phrase. Reactive approach to known bugs and software defects. A patch or fix is only given if the customer actively complains. The current product is supported by a handful of developers, and the lead developer is well past retirement age. The company will be in serious trouble if any of the critical developers leave for any reason. There is enormous technical debt, and a lot of tribal knowledge that tenured employees refuse to share. Serious moral issues. Almost every employee I spoke with had negative things to say about the CEO, and the future of the company. Moral is lowest with the development team. Company seems to be treading water, no growth in 3 years. Customers seem to be lost faster than they are brought on board.

The previous CEO and developer partner created a good product. The existing customer base is fairly loyal, and may support the company for some time. There are some good, smart people there. Benefits are decent.

The company is in a precarious position because it offers essentially one product, which was built up organically for 25+ years. It has thousands of features. Maintaining this mountain of technical debt is likely to become infeasible in the near future. The company's future relies on rebuilding its software using new technology, but the development effort faces serious impediments; 1. There is no technical lead or manager. 2. The non-technical CEO does not trust developers and makes decisions for emotional reasons. 3. There are very few requirements, because no business analyst has ever been hired. 4. Visible results are prioritized over good architecture, refactoring, unit testing, etc. 5. Morale and productivity are damaged by backward views, e.g. "Code shouldn't go to QA with defects" and "If it takes more than a couple days, it's being done wrong". 6. An inexplicable choice to cling to the original obscure, creaky DB and jungle of a "schema". I estimate that these factors reduce development efficiency by 80% There is no performance review process. The value of my work was almost never recognized. My level of stress was very high much of the time.