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SmartLight Analytics

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Toxic Leadership and Resistance to Modern Practices Overshadow Mission - Senior Software Development Engineer SmartLight Analytics Employee Review

1.0
10 Aug 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* Mission to identify and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in healthcare claims is meaningful and valuable. * Dedicated engineers who want to improve processes and technology. * Initial efforts to adopt Agile and standard industry practices.

Cons

* Outdated Tech Stack: Heavy reliance on obscure systems like myDBR over widely used, maintainable technologies. Proposals to modernize tech stack are consistently rejected (e.g. using Source Control like Git, moving to Cloud). * Failure to Deliver Key Projects: The long-promised Data Warehouse project has been repeatedly restarted with new contractors for over a year, with no tangible progress or lessons learned. * Untested Production Changes: CTO directly codes in production without testing or communicating changes with the tech team causing recurring production issues and urgent fixes being pushed onto engineers to resolve. * Dismantling of Agile Framework: Team workflows using Agile methodologies were dismantled without team input, creating confusion, redundancy, and wasted effort. The replacement workflow assigns tickets from a leadership-created priority queue to the next available engineer, regardless of context or complexity. Retrospective meetings were dismantled, preventing engineers from providing candid team feedback to improve processes. * Toxic Leadership: Leadership behavior includes inconsistent feedback, shifting expectations, and lack of support. Leadership focused only on delayed tickets and cut 1:1s short when no negative feedback was available. * Dismissive of Stakeholder Input: Tech management assumes they know best and treats stakeholder perspectives as mere opinions. * Questionable Performance Management: Performance Improvement Plan included areas of improvement with no supporting evidence, new expectations & issues first raised in the PIP document, and requirements that appeared to be designed for failure. Termination occurred before the plan’s completion and without full opportunity to address concerns.

Explore other reviews about SmartLight Analytics

5.0
4 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Very passionate group of people actually looking to make a difference in the healthcare industry. Every one I have spoken to is incredibly smart and really knows their stuff, I can’t speak to all mangers but I do feel that my direct supervisor does look out for me and wants the team to succeed. Overall I feel like I’ve learned a lot here and I am excited to see how the company grows

Cons

It can feel like a hectic environment at times, juggling deadlines and other projects can be a little bit of a struggle

5.0
28 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Mission driven, high growth company, with smart colleagues. We are all committed to making a real difference in the healthcare industry. Leadership offers flexibility.

Cons

The company is in a high growth period, so work can sometimes be overwhelming. Leadership has posted many open roles to fill, but in the short term, workloads are pretty heavy. I feel confident that this will ease up in the next few months as new employees are onboarded.

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