Great Culture - lack of diversity & tech - District Sales Representative Ben E. Keith Employee Review

great job and good work life balance

no cons everything has been great

There was always food. They catered food in constantly from their customers for different events. Fridays they would have free doughnuts in office. They had great coffee machines, and always gave away free beer. Nice offices downtown and most of the employees are really nice people.

There was a lack of leadership in the part of the downtown Fort Worth offices in the tech area. A lot of changes and no one seemed to know what they were doing. The leadership at the downtown office did not know much about the technology and was trying to implement a new application that nearly wiped out the entire Fort Worth branch because they chose to pay a third world company millions of dollars to develop something that the employees that they had in office could have completed with half the hassle and most likely half the price. But the leadership team does not know enough about the technology they are trying to implement to know what they have in front of them. I saw many good programmers leave or get forced out by the use of performance plans with unrealistic expectations. We had a guy that could write code in 5 different languages. he learned PHP just for this job, then when upper management decided they were going to use the third world company to write the code for their sales application, they put him on an employee performance plan and kept changing the goals to get off of the plan, which eventually led to his termination. They are also falling behind technologically, still using COBOL and JCL when they should have upgraded systems years ago. All of the programmers are older and have either been there forever or are contractors because they can not keep new employees. As a programmer I would suggest looking elsewhere unless you like COBOL. Then this place may be right for you.