Sandata Technologies Reviews

Unfortunately, Sandata has notable drawbacks that prospective candidates should consider. It is crucial to be aware of multiple hidden aspects of the company that may impact one's desire or ability to perform their job because a company culture will determine why a person should join and how people treat each other will determine how long they stay at this organization. 1. Repeated Layoffs This company has been going downhill for some time. They have gone through two rounds of lay-offs in two years. This company has a history of lay-offs every year right before the holidays. They downsized a number of people with no regard to the skills, experience, and knowledge they bring to their jobs. Their ultimate priority is cost savings. And the rest of us spent weeks and months figuring out their jobs because they left with their specialized knowledge in their areas. Some of us did not even have access to the systems, file shares, or documents these people were able to access. The company downsized their staff purely based on compensation. They would rather deal with the chaos and confusion of the mess they created than strive to keep these people with their knowledge, skills, and access. And this has caused low morale for the rest of us because a number of us now wonder who's next. People get laid off just before they are about to graduate to the next rung on their 401K vesting schedule, so they do not get the next stage of the company's contributions to their 401k. For example, if you are approaching your 2-year anniversary, they will lay you off just before your 2-year anniversary, so you do not get 20% of the company contributions. If you are approaching your 4-year anniversary, they will lay you off before your 4-year anniversary, so you do not get 40% of the company contributions. They look at who's about to graduate on their vesting schedule, and that is one of the cost-savings criteria they use to decide who's next. 2. Lack of Communication from Leadership This company suffers from a severe lack of communication from the top-down. I am not talking about company townhall meetings. Those meetings only show the positives, such as the earned income, profits over the past year, and what markets we are adding. I am talking about what they always and conveniently ignore during those townhall meetings, including what is going wrong with the company, what we can do to improve, and what plans we are enacting to solve those problems. Any important and practical change being made by leadership behind the scenes that can impact the people doing the actual work are not communicated down to the department or team level until the very last minute, making it difficult for workers to adapt and change. For example, we may be sprinting with the understanding that actual Sandata full-time employees are working on a project, but then we find out that the CTO decided to give that project to a group of short-term contractors instead at the start of the next sprint. The CTO did not communicate this change, leaders of engineering did not communicate it, and the team leaders did not know. This type of disruptive change causes chaos and mistrust because you do not know what else is being planned that you are not aware of until the last minute. And if you do not adjust at the last minute, you are seen as inflexible and not a team player. On a side note, the current CTO does not have any engineering townhalls with actual engineers doing the work. This practice existed before with past CTO's. In another example, the latest CTO enacted the new practice of Product-Oriented Delivery. This change was pushed down to all the teams without getting any feedback from the team leaders and the people performing the work before the change about how work may be impacted, how our deliveries may be impacted, and how our service to our customers and stakeholders may be impacted. The leaders also did not collect any results of the change after it was implemented either to see if it is working or not working. It was done purely at the executive level with no prior communication. This change was vast and impactful across every team in the organization. 3. Lack of Organizational Coordination and Standardization This company is known for starting multiple projects or initiatives and not seeing it through properly from start to finish. They are more about adopting industry trending catch phrases than using or practicing it correctly. In one example, this company adopted Scrum as their software development methodology across multiple development teams. Different teams have different flavors of Scrum or use some parts of Scrum and not the other. One team may have sprint plannings and retrospectives, but another team may not have retrospectives at all. One team may be estimating based on story points, and another team may be estimating based on days or hours. Even though they brought in consultants to train the staff multiple times, they failed to standardize the same set of practices across teams and communicate its benefits because even after the training, certain people find it pointless and refrain from contributing in team meetings. In a second example, the company decided to split development teams into New Feature Enhancement and Run-the-Business teams where the NFE team produces new features and the RTB team deals with production issues. The development teams were split, it caused unnecessary discord and chaos within the teams, and then the company went mute on the topic after it was implemented and the damage was done, only to let each team decide their fate. In a third example, the company decided to migrate many of their applications and services to AWS cloud. They are more about trumpeting that "we are cloud-native" rather than understanding what managed service is the most appropriate in what situation or taking ideas from people who have used those services before. They will ignore ideas from past cloud practitioners and delegate AWS learning to developers who have never once used AWS and waste months learning it instead. 4. Constantly Changing Strategies and Priorities Several executive and C-level leaders have come and gone in the company. This repeated change of leadership has led to changing strategies, tactics, and priorities. The people doing the work has needed to adapt to the changes along with their work. And this has led to multiple hierarchical and organizational changes. This has only caused more chaos and confusion in the process. For example, under the previous Chief Product Officer, the organization tried to bring Scrum practices to all the product and development teams. They brought in consultants to train the teams. Some of the teams adopted most of the Scrum practices, while other teams resisted the changes fiercely. This could have been standardized if leadership did not change. But at some point, the CPO could not make any more impactful changes and left the company. No one else was hired to replace his position, so the company continued to operate with no standards on the product side. The only C-level leader left who was still promoting Scrum was our CTO. But he was pushed out of his position due to other strife between him and the CEO. They hired a new CTO from outside the organization. The new CTO replaced Scrum with Product-Oriented Delivery (POD). This new practice again caused massive change in the organization where people were moved in to other departments, former leaders and managers left, etc. Do you see the pattern here? This problem is tied with their lack of coordination and standardization that I explained before. Their constant churn of people and their changing strategies and plans have only led to more chaos and confusion. It is a miracle that any work gets done amidst all this chaos. 5. Poor Leadership and Lack of Leadership Training Leaders at this company are leaders only by title but are not good people leaders. Some of them have no skill in talking with people, listening to their followers, encouraging different viewpoints, or showing empathy on any level. For example, some leaders or managers voice their opinions or decisions and everyone else must fall in line. They routinely drown out voices and condescend and talk down to people because they simply do not have the patience to entertain alternative ideas. When faced with other ideas or even questions about their own ideas, such managers get agitated, get visibly upset on camera, talk down to you, and get you to shut up. This has happened to a number of people across teams because certain leaders conduct themselves in this way. In the end, you come to these meetings with your mouth permanently shut because you do not want to cause another scene at a team meeting. If you subscribe to the Steve Jobs management philosophy where "you don't hire smart people and tell them what to do", this place does the opposite. These leaders repeatedly display this condescending and narrow-minded attitude and get away with it because the company does nothing about it. In another example, some leaders may take sides without hearing both sides of the story. If some disagreement or conflict arises between an employee and his/her manager, some leaders will side with the employee in order to appease the employee and force the manager to apologize for something the manager has not done. These leaders will threaten managers with their jobs without taking the time to hear both sides of the story. When it turns out the employee fabricated lies, the manager is the one who was proven right in the end, but the manager was also humiliated through the process because he had to apologize for something he had not done. Bad behaviors like these happen all the time at the leadership level. 6. Lack of Planning / Reactive Culture This company has never enacted the right practices in engineering to plan ahead of time for production failures, issues, bugs, etc. We have put monitoring in place to alert us about failures and issues. But at some point, we perform a root cause analysis and determine that certain patterns exist causing these issues, such as not enough hardware resources or an obsolete software technology stack. Regardless of the root cause, some amount of resources and time are needed to remedy these causes. The company may take the short and easy path of adding more memory and storage to a server, but if it involves a long-term solution like hiring more people and migrating features designed in an older software framework to a newer software framework or to the web, those strategies will be turned down because they require a financial investment. Those investments are frowned upon, but they would rather deal with repeated production issues and a failing brand image and reputation from our customers. Once again, cost is the source motivation behind not investing in long-term solutions for repeated problems. 7. Lack of Innovation This company company has been in existence for more than 40 years and they have never created anything new or innovative after their primary product and they have never grown beyond a few hundred employees. You would expect a company that has been in existence for so long to grow into a mid-sized company at least by now. They have had the same Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) product and a few other ancillary products for years now. They added some new features over the years. But the only major innovative change they can claim is that they made migrated it to AWS, adding scalability and reliability. They have not created any new products in all this time to grow their product portfolio or to expand into new markets. They have acquired smaller companies to grow their portfolio instead. They use the same products to expand into more markets, our products have very little differentiation, and they are replicable by our competitors. It is only a matter of time until competitors can match our product features for less cost, catch up, and surpass us. Competitors are offering products with similar features on a more modern technology stack with more efficient design and coding, so users get a more friendly and streamlined experience. Our customers notice that our products are slow, buggy, inefficient, and expensive too. It is only a matter of time until we lose our competitive advantage. 8. Resistance to New Ideas The culture at this company is unfriendly to change or new ideas. In one example, one VP left this place because he tried to enact meaningful change from the top-down that would have streamlined processes or more made them efficient, but his voice was routinely ignored or suppressed. He realized he was wasting his time and took his energy and talent elsewhere. New managers will come to find out quickly that it takes 10 chefs to cook 1 meal at this company, and you will end up with a burnt meal. In a second example, another manager routinely voiced his ideas, suggestions, and approaches to make processes more efficient. A number of us found his ideas refreshing and progressive, but he was later put on disciplinary action because he spoke up too often. He left the company also. In a third example, multiple product managers and scrum masters have tried to suggest the Scaled Agile Framework instead of Scrum where we can leverage Product Increment planning and the Agile Release Train using our Jira product, so we can plan ahead for several weeks or sprints at a time and schedule milestones, instead of only planning ahead for the next sprint. The lack of PI Planning in Jira made planning for features and milestones even harder on the engineering side because engineering milestones needed to be tracked in a separate area from Jira to keep them aligned with product milestones, even though engineers use Jira for tracking their backlog and their sprint work, all because the company resists the idea of adopting SAFE and saw no benefit in PI Planning. 9. Excessive Meetings Even though this company has good work-life balance, it does not have good work-meeting balance. You can be a manager, leader, architect, or an individual contributer who is needed on multiple teams, and you will find your schedule eventually littered with meetings from multiple teams and departments. Some are important, but some are a waste of time. You literally have to block your schedule with personal time so you can get work done and people do not fill up your Outlook with meetings back-to-back. Even if you have one or two hours in your day to catch up on work, it is extremely difficult to get anything done due to context switching and you are exhausted coming out of your last meeting. Sometimes you find yourself doing your work during the evenings or weekends to catch up from the time missed during the week. A number of people have complained that you come here to meet and not to work. 10. Elements of Discrimination and Prejudice Some cruel and vicious people exist within this company who target others based purely on false accusations and lies simply because they do not like you for one reason or another. This company leaves it open for anyone to use the system and target anyone else even based on false accusations. And these people can get away with their wrongdoing because they are operating within the system. I'll give you a real-life example. Imagine you went out of your way to recognize a more experienced member of a team for their achievements and the praise they received from other teams. This person turns around, fabricates a lie, accuses you of something you had not done, and uses the system to launch an investigation against you. You are left speechless about this person's actions. You contend that you had not done anything wrong, no one believes you, HR investigates and questions every member on your team, and they could NOT find one single shred of evidence to prove you did anything wrong. How can a person you just lauded for their achievements turn around and stab you in the back? You conclude this person is either psychotic or prejudiced. You notice this person treats others fairly and respectfully and only treats you with malice. You must conclude this person is treating you unfairly or disrciminating against you. And later you find out it was a team effort because one other team member was encouraging this person all along to make life difficult for you as much as possible. Was it because they were here longer than you? Was it because they do not like following a team leader who belongs to another ethnic group? You have no choice but to get away from these people, but you do know that you faced discrimination of one kind. Anyone may be thinking, how can people get away this? They can get away with abusing the system because they have been working here longer than you, they know how to use the system, and there are no repercussions for anyone who uses the system to accuse someone else, even if they are based on lies and false accusations, because HR is following their rules to follow up on every accusation, true or false. HR needs to realize the person who was targeted and falsely accused left the process feeling discriminated, framed, humiliated, and vilified. Just be warned that certain teams in this company have the most cruel, disgusting, toxic, and vicious people you have ever worked with in your career. In another example, some leaders may favor one gender over another. These leaders will ignore instant messages from a manager who is of one gender for a couple of days and instantly reply to messages of employees of the opposite gender. Yes, these behaviors do happen in practice and in secret and go unnoticed in the company. 11. Patterns of Ego, Insubordination, and Favoritism You may think that if you are a manager, you have the ability to lead and manage your team. Wrong. You may be given a team after an organizational transition where the employees of that team still favor and respect their former manager. You then end up up with a team of people where the team refuses to listen, refuses to answer your messages, refuses to attend team meetings, refuses to take your ideas and plans, and goes around questioning and sabotaging every decision you make behind your back. They will roll their eyes on camera with no regard to how disrespectful and insubordinate they come across. Why is it that the people who should not be on camera always insist on being on camera? Do everyone else a favor and turn your camera off, so the rest of us do not have to see your miserable faces. There are others in teams who automatically assume they are the smartest or the most knowledgeable person in the room simply because of their age. It does not matter if you are more practiced, more experienced, or have more knowledge in a certain area than the rest of the team. You may even be their leader. But these people will refuse to contribute in meetings in areas where they appear less knowledgeable. These are the same people who have never once brought a single fresh and innovative idea to the table. These are usually people who have worked in the same technology base for years with no idea that there are better frameworks, processes, or techiques out there. But they are too busy thinking older people always have more knowledge in every possible area and refuse to have a humble mindset and refuse to learn something new from someone younger who might know more. How are they repeatedly getting away with these bad behaviors, especially against their leader or manager? Since this company has changed their organizational hierarchy so many times and former managers of these people have moved on to other positions, people on your team still regard their former leaders and managers with more respect. People on your team will contact their former managers questioning your every decision and have discussions behind your back. If you want to complain about their repeated insubordination, upper management will conclude that you are failing to manage the team and you are doing something wrong, when the team literally is sabotaging and resisting your every effort to lead the team. Favoritism and old alliances do exist. This company fosters a culture where repeated insubordination has no consequence because there is no way to correct this bad behavior on your team since your team members are protected by their former managers. Their former managers have the ears of their leaders, and they will always protect or favor their former employees over their new managers, thus encouraging and excarbating bad behaviors, making such teams impossible to lead or manage. HR needs to eliminate this culture of favoritism and put practices in place where new managers are allowed to correct these bad behaviors. 12. Attrition The company's ineffective culture, bad behaviors, and bad practices have influenced people to leave. This company has gone through 3 CEO's, 3 CTO's, 1 CPO, and multiple executive leaders in only the past few years. One VP left because his ideas were never heard. Another VP left because the CEO would rather bring in an outside CTO than promote from within. The Chief Product Officer left because he was unable to bring any meaningful change also. And several others individual contributors left because their voices were never heard or they had to deal with these bad behaviors and practices. These people included product owners, scrum masters, sales, customer support, implementation, and engineers.