Pinnacol Reviews

At the time of writing this, Glassdoor says the company is going through a "hiring surge". You might think it's because the company has a new project or is experiencing stellar growth and you'd be wrong. It's because product owners, designers, and engineers have been fleeing the company in droves over the past six months. This is an old company that's convinced itself it's a tech company. They know some of the agile jargon, they even have the agile ceremonies, and they talk up being "product-led", but it's all fluff. After a briefly being nominally "product-led", the product leadership was fired and replaced by lean coaches and project managers. Understand that this is a waterfall shop with fancier names. Tech works for sales and underwriting. This was made regularly clear by the fact that any time there was a disagreement between tech and the business side on absolutely anything, no matter how sound the tech reasoning was or how minor the disagreement was, tech lost. It doesn't matter if the disagreement was about what to build and how to do it, or a process internal to the tech teams, or even tools that only tech uses. If business didn't like it or see the value in it, it was gone. One notable quote from the CIO after sales was ruffled over the product team working with their agency clients for user testing: "From now on all products need to be 90% complete before a user sees it. We don't need to user test because we know what our users want". Now, I'm guessing that a Pinnacol rep will reply to this talking about how they're in the process of going through a "digital transformation". I'm not taking a jab at you, Senior Communications Specialist. You're doing your job and everyone I knew at PA who did your job was very kind. This "transformation" has been going on for at least a decade only to fail and be restarted repeatedly over that time. So far every product produced during these transformations has been abandoned and/or rebooted from scratch. This happened several times while I was here. For all I know, the current do over of the transformation is still ongoing and the products I worked on are still being built. However, out of the 30+ product owners, engineers, QAs, DevOps, and designers who were working on this transformation iteration for the past couple years, only one is still around. Does this mean you shouldn't work here? Maybe. A tech job can be very good if you don't want to do much. I knew coworkers who put a lot of hours into other projects while on the clock. I knew people who could be mistaken for being retired. It's pretty easy to slip by doing nothing if you like that sort of thing. If you want to learn and build things beyond MVPs, this probably isn't the place for you anymore.

The IS Department is very dysfunctional and averse to change. I was actually reprimanded for suggesting that we implement code review. They also lack technical leadership within the management ranks and don't seem to prioritize other tech industry standards such as knowledge redundancy and documentation. Their excuse for this is always "we're not a tech company - we're an insurance company". I did get the impression that other departments were better. The CEO seems to have a good vision but he is reckless with feedback that he requests of the employees. For example, I went to their quarterly new hire employee breakfast and was asked to provide feedback about my experience at Pinnacol so far. I explained some of the issues we were facing on my team and a few days later found myself in trouble with my boss. If he is going to ask for feedback, he should be more careful with how this information is handled so that employees feel comfortable coming forward without fear of retribution.