RTZ Associates Reviews

Management is terrible. They generally treat their employees like dirt, overwork them and underpay them. Sometimes they even talk trash to their faces in front of other employees. On more than several occasions I witnessed employees leave a meeting visibly upset. Employees are potentially mis-classified as salaried (as opposed to hourly) in order to avoid paying overtime. They also somehow "forgot" to dispense the legally required amount of sick-time to employees (based on Oakland ordinance) for almost a year and a half. It is an unspoken expectation that employees will forgo lunch breaks (and as a salaried employee, breaks apparently aren't legally required - and they will tell you that), and that they will regularly stay after hours to work, or work on the weekends. Which wouldn't be bad if one were making a decent wage, but that's not the case. They will track all of your work hours, up to and including leaving 5 minutes early for a personal reason. You will be expected to make up that 5 minutes of missed time by staying 5 minutes later the next day. All of this, while the CEO and father (the founder) drive brand-new Porches and Teslas, and don't even bother to park like a normal human being (meaning the CEO likes to park across multiple parking spaces like every other terrible person you've encountered in parking lots). Avoid this place at all costs, unless your only other choice is starvation or eviction. It is soul crushing. I would give them less than one star if I could.

There's way too much to list. But here are some of the lowlights; - Upper Management (Poppa Bear and Son) are arrogant, greedy people who don't care about their employees. Everyone is underpaid while these two drive around in new cars and brag openly about how rich they are. - Everyone is underpaid. I worked there for 4 years and never cracked 45k a year for a job I am now making six figures doing. Everyone that I talked to about salary also admitted to me that they knew they were grossly underpaid. - Terrible work environment. Not only is their tech out of date, overly complicated and poorly designed, but all the equipment used is from the stone age. My last year working there was 2013, and I was using Window 2000 up until 2012, when I finally was "upgraded" to Windows XP. All while working on a CTR monitor and a computer that took 2 min to load any google result. - In the end, working here was a detriment. I never learned anything about software development that was applicable in other places. For example, they don't practice scrum/agile development methodologies. In fact, the whole time I worked there, I never even heard those terms. They plan zero meetings, there are no development plans that are shared, no documentation and no use of good third party tools like JIRA or confluence. There's no sense of work/life balance. Management there just expects work. There are no in office perks like snacks (except for free soda and occasional bagels that the son brings in and then brags about what a good thing he did). All in all, if you want to be a part of the absolute, most non-tech industry tech company in the Bay Area, apply at RTZ Associates. Also, no room to advance. I was there for four years, like I've said, and held the same job. I think I got one, small raise of about 2k a year. This place is a joke.