Pica9 Reviews

3.5

69% would recommend to a friend

(29 total reviews)
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Bruce Reading

73% approve of CEO

52% positive business outlook

Pica9 has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 29 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Pica9 employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

29 reviews
2.0
20 Aug 2014

Amateur and Derisive

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good employees for the most part - honestly good people who I still talk to Decent location Was very informal

Cons

Everything I say in this review is just my opinion. I hope what I say here benefits the company down the road and it's only because I value this company so much I'm willing to be honest. Sometimes the best lessons are the hardest ones to hear. I'm very skeptical of the existing reviews. Very few people at the company would actually endorse them in a sober state. They sound oddly like something management itself would put forward. The management style here is very immature. The fiefdom of management is a vacuum of decision making that is often out of sync with reality and clearly separates themselves from others. Management has even gone as far as advising people to "choose sides" which I found alarming. When a plan is laid out that doesn't conform with budgeting, premature estimates, or a manager's notions you are simply forced into going with a kludge. Beware the words "for now" - the company is built on a heap of "for now"'s. Planning here is frustrating at best. It's made worse by the low level of sophistication at this company. The "senior" planners are largely ignorant of how things should actually be done. Management makes this worse by not understanding how to better their skills or augmenting them by hiring more skilled employees. After each release nightmare the company marches on victoriously. Naturally both business and software are developed during these marches however the quality and vision of these developments are severely lacking. In the long run the unsustainability of this bad code and the depressing user experiences will not lead to anything I would have been proud to be a part of. Change is only accepted in lip service. It is never actualized. That was one of the main problems I had with this company. Sometimes I feel you have to admit you have a bad approach especially when the empirical evidence is making it clear. I never saw this done. Instead new projects would be taken on and implemented in the same slipshod manner. No real planning, no real testing, no real QA - no real production schedule - changes up until the last second. Lastly the CEO has a history of getting very angry with people to the point where it's become a running joke in the company. He's involved in absolutely every plan that is made and often aggressively enforces his ideas. He operates on confirmation bias alone and it's only during ephemeral moments of lucidity that he realizes he's may have been going about it all wrong. It's during these times his grace and humility shine through. Sadly the managers below him fold like chairs once he begins these tirades which always meant we were heading towards yet another bad implementation. I wanted to work at a forward looking and passionate software company. Instead I ended up working where mediocre software goes to die. To make matters worse the somewhat open atmosphere I started working in had been usurped by the cheap imitation of a tightly run corporate ship. It's purely a facade though. Professionalism takes more than policies and an empty smile. I would recommend this company for anyone who is looking for disenchantment and fake platitudes.

1.0
16 Jan 2018

Sinking Ship - Stay Away!!

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

If you want to learn everything not to do in business and as a moral human being, lessons are in abundance on the daily. The company also offers standard start-up benefits that you can and should find anywhere else- “unlimited” PTO, happy hours on Friday that no one sticks around for, and occasionally there are dogs in the office that cause chaos. No other benefits or pros to think of. Unless you enjoy being screwed over.

Cons

What has happened to this company?! The small, passionate, hard-working and successful (profitable) company of the past is very nearly disintegrated. The level of disrespect that I had to put up with for the past year and a half is astounding. The only employees who know what they are doing and perform at top level are mistreated by everyone else. Idiots who take advantage of all of the significant work that’s been accomplished since the company's founding. About a quarter of the employees are inspiring, intelligent and hard-working individuals who are chronically underpaid and undervalued. The most incompetent people have been put in all positions of leadership, and throughout the company, and it SHOWS. If this company goes back to its roots, it may find something salvageable yet, but there is no guarantee. All I can say is- if you are smart you’ll stay away. There is nothing to be gained from joining a failing company led by a lying, thieving parasite.

1.0
25 Aug 2014

Unprofessional And Sloppy

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The staff is full of great, genuine people. There is no office politics amongst the staff (which makes it all the more surprising that the problems of this workplace are solely caused by how bad management is). Most people are willing to make changes to have a longer more successful future for the company. Relaxed environment and easy to feel at home.

Cons

My opinions below. Management lacks professionalism and treats employees differently based on whether they like them or not. Too bad for the company because usually the proficient employees are the ones they don’t like. The reason being the management's horrible practices and intolerance towards anyone that wants to make the company even slightly better. You’d think everyone would want what’s best for the company but management is the reason this company is doing so tragically. Bad releases. Features don’t ever go through enough QA, prices are too high only because of the lack of quality of work and needing to account for all the bugs that come up with every push. Even so nothing ever gets done on time. Employees are very unhappy but instead of trying to find a solution management just acts like they are constantly in a sales pitch, covering things up and pretending everything is pink and rosy. There are no regularly scheduled employee reviews some people have them three months after joining some don't even after three years, which means more opportunities for some people and not others based on nothing tangible at all. People here are oblivious to how a tech company should be run. A lot of tech concepts that would be a given for other companies are not even talked about or accounted for. The people in charge do not have the experience to be where they are. The criteria for promotion should not be "level of agreement with the CEO." First and foremost a company needs to keep metrics to even think about getting better, even after 10+ years, Pica9 does not keep (in my opinion) useful or precise metrics so surely any kind of planning will be based on mere whim rather than data.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 29 Reviews

Glassdoor has 31 Pica9 reviews submitted anonymously by Pica9 employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Pica9 is right for you.