Dumpster Fire Seeking Jack Of All Trades - Product Manager Everi Employee Review

Great Culture Great Team Great Work Life Balance

no particular cons at Everi, it is what you make out of it

Close to home so commute was quick and easy Most employees in office were easy to work with and pretty good people for the most part Received yearly raises* Discretionary Time off was good** Reverse osmosis water was really tasty Yearly Holiday parties were fun

The team consisted of in office and offshore Development and QA staff. This made communication difficult as accountability was always shifted to an "us/we" instead of holding specific people or groups of people accountable for the many problems the team faced. Problem employees, especially the offshore teammates were coddled and protected by management on our team and while we were told they had been directed on fixing problems on their end, things never got better and no one ever got disciplined. This really added to the resentment and animosity between the two halves of the team. Lack of updated documentation. We apparently had a Tech writer on the team that was never included on any meetings and updates to software or applications that the team worked on. Documentation would have to be updated by QA or Dev but there would never be any time to do so given the backlog. Was told on multiple occasions and meetings that automation tools would be introduced, but would always be delayed for unknown reasons. Communication across departments was always a hassle. Lots of products required cross-department cooperation to time releases and we would always seem to be either a step ahead or behind another department causing delays because of it. Submitting time sheets was different depending on which department you were in. Initially it was simply tracking 8 hours each day to the project we were working on, but management felt the need to update it to a more specified process. They wanted to calculate how long it took to complete a given work item to make planning each cycle more accurately. Sounds great in theory, but in execution, it was not. Every single item that was worked on had to be tracked to the minute. There was push back on multiple occasions, but management didn't care and implemented the change anyways. In-office QA would be completing a number of tasks a day and tracking 8 hours each day, while the offshore team would track multiple hours to an individual task, even if it would have taken them minutes to complete. This proved that the new system created more problems than it hoped to fix. We didn't benefit from this new system and it just made workers more resentful to management. It was even mentioned that we would run this new process as a test and then have a feedback session to see if we would continue using said process. That meeting never happened and the process was kept. Lack of design meetings and absolutely no inclusion of QA to anything that would have benefit the team to include them in. Problems always seemed to reveal themselves during the QA step of the project and they were problems that Project Managers and the like seemed to just gloss over during early phases. This lead to delays on multiple occasions. Management will not listen to reasonable feedback. We had a single retrospective meeting and the meeting ended with a large number of pain points, with many left unsaid because the meeting had to end as scheduled. We never had another retrospective since then and those points never got addressed. Management would rather hire 10 more offshore employees with no casino gaming/gaming fintech experience just because they are cheaper than hiring one or two experienced QA or Dev to work in house at our main location even though we desperately needed it. Instead of product getting tested more efficiently, you now have more problems since training was never provided to said workers despite being told they did. The amount of problems we faced clearly disproved that. At home, the company was becoming less inclusive with all the new hires that were seemingly from one country and it wasn't people from North America. There were so many competent local applicants that were not hired because someone wanted to hire their brothers and sisters instead. When an entire team is one ethnicity, you obviously aren't hiring based on merit or honoring equal opportunity. Not that I didn't appreciate the work that some of them did. Some of them were very good workers, but a lot others were clearly not cut out for the job, but got retained because management would cover up their mistakes. It seems to be happening at a lot of tech companies and Everi seemed to embrace the trend with open arms. *Yearly raises were given but it always seemed like they were having to "pull strings" in order give any amount over 1%. Bonuses were always based on how well the whole company performed, but because we were losing money/under performing, bonuses were small and unappealing. **Discretionary time off was a benefit that everyone at the company was given while working there, but for some reason none of those in upper management seemed to understand how it worked. It was clearly outlined in the employee handbook and yet there were multiple attempts by management to circumvent the policy and create their own guidelines even though doing so was completely and utterly against company policy. While I did enjoy my time off using the DTO, management obviously felt the need to impose limits to how much time off per calendar year an employee could take. Instead of just denying time off which would have sufficed under the company policy, management would allow up to a specified amount and any amount after would be heavily scrutinized and require upper management's approval, despite the handbook clearly stating that it only need be approved by the individual employee's manager and no one else. No one was ever found to be abusing said DTO policy. Management clearly just wanted to complain about something that had no verifiable effect on project completion rates/timing.