Unsure future - Anonymous employee iTRACS Employee Review

Parking is easy, accessibility is good for airport and commuting. Some staff are nice but are hard to find in such a environment.

The environment is toxic and very unpleasant. Management seldom agree on anything and do not communicate well. This factor is then taken out on staff, who are are often humiliated and treated like small children. The reasons for such humiliations can be as trivial as meeting time changes to major miscommunication. None are treated as an opportunity to learn or teach, but to pass blame and make someone look incompetent. Direction is poor, although upper management are clear about overall direction they do not know how to get there, therefore give vague instructions and direction to staff, setting them up for failure when instructions are misinterpreted and allowing themselves to be absolved from any blame due to the vagueness of original instruction. Personalities are volatile, hostile and self preserving. This is not an environment for teamwork and leadership. The overall strategy seems to throw as many over qualified new hires into roles they don't fully understand when there is a problem to magically fix it. Then offload the new hires once they realize this is not what they wanted or needed. Very little recourse as there is no on site HR person. Avoid at all costs.

If you can learn enough jargon to impress them, they'll hire you. You don't ever have to actually produce anything, just show up for the endless meetings. It's a good way to get a paycheck while looking for another job or going to school. Nothing you actually do produce will ever be used, so you don't have to put any real effort into it. You can spend your day doing homework instead. :)

Pretty much everything that is a Pro is also a Con, if you're looking for a career or want to take pride and have dignity in what you do. If you're under the age of 40, the CEO, automatically treats you like a child. I saw her regularly talking down to someone who'd been at the company for many years. The person was in their mid 30's (I think) and the CEO treated them like they were a 10 year old. She dressed them down in front of everyone and when the person asked to move it to a private conference room, she exploded even further. She has a very volatile temperament and if you cross her once (or are even perceived to), she will make it her mission to ensure everyone in the company knows how worthless she thinks you are, forever more. Beyond that, it is an extremely HOSTILE work environment. They had a QA Manager for a couple years that regularly, publicly screamed (not exaggerating) at one of his employees, shouting that he was stupid, used the word "retarded" often, completely worthless, threatening bodily harm, job termination and often, death. I'm not kidding, he actually said, several times a week, "I will kill you. I will cut off your head and set you on fire!" What did the employee in question do to provoke the manager? He showed up 15 minutes late once due traffic problems. The manager, ever since, would nit-pick and harass the employee. He couldn't do anything right ever again, in the managers eyes. If the employees fingernails were dirty, there would be a shouting match. The employee had to resort to recording the conversations and threaten legal action just to get them toned down. They never stopped. The managers manager, VP of Operations refused to do anything about his QA managers attitude. He felt it was perfectly fine and OK for management to threaten employees they didn't like. This is not an exaggeration. I don't know what happened to the QA manager, but he left the company. They haven't been able to keep a QA or Support manager since then, because the VP of Operations, He can't solve problem s and regularly makes matters worse. He contradicts his own directives, then yells at you and writes you up for not doing whatever it was he wanted done. If you show him the emails where he's contradicting himself, his usual response it to write you up for insubordination. He's incredibly snarky and has no problems demeaning you and everything you've ever done, professionally and personally, in front of anyone, including the board of directors. He often talks to him employees as if they're babies or toddlers. He is not fit to manage other human beings in any way, shape or form. When customer implementation projects start to fall behind, iTRACS' CEO hires more people for the project, but she hires Project Managers (from outside the company) who don't do any actual work on the project. I'm not exaggerating. She one time had a HUGE project that was three weeks behind because they had ONE, ONE SINGLE person doing all the implementation. The CEO's solution to get the project back on track was to hire more project managers. Each Project Manager feels that their timelines and action items outweigh the other PM's and with so many PM's, people report to at least two at once. If you do something from one PM, the other PM will try to write you up for not doing what they said. So, you just point out the other PM's directive and let them fight it out while you go do some Calc homework. I could probably keep going, but I think I've made my case: This is a hostile, unfriendly, de-moralizing, high-stress and completely unstable environment with absolutely no redeeming qualities other than "it's a paycheck". It's like being in an abusive relationship. They tear you down mentally and emotionally and try to get you to believe that they're doing you a favor by hiring you and therefore you owe them your soul. Some people actually have fallen victim to it and really don't believe that they can get another job, so they're stuck there making half as much money as they could, elsewhere. I've managed to avoid it because I know that as soon as I get my degree, I'm out of here.