APCON reviews

Chaotic and unrealistic schedules make it difficult to succeed. Even if additional features are added to the product, it is "late" if the original unrealistic date is not met. Product development is based on the feature of the day that springs from the CEO's head. Nobody in engineering is allowed to talk to customers and the process used to derive the features is opaque. Attempts to improve the process are viewed with hostility. Management (mostly due to the CEO who owns the whole place) cannot bring themselves to trust most of their employees and constantly treat them like they are trying to cheat the company when the reality is that they are simply trying to do good work. It is a very difficult environment. Ideas are not welcomed and if you make very many suggestions, you end up on a corrective action plan. People are put in information silos and attempts are made to prevent them from talking to each other, so it's often difficult to get the information you need to do your job. Access to information on servers is very restricted, often to what is a ridiculous degree. In spite of HR's comments here in response to another (spot-on) review, HR does not help the employees and cannot be trusted with anything. HR has run off good employees based on a single off-hand remark. Corrective action plans with vague objectives are implemented with frightening frequency.

The owner and CEO has precious little idea how to grow a company successfully. He has never worked in or grown a company of size. As a consequence, he micromanages everything, and often badly. Employees are treated as completely interchangeable and replaceable. They are viewed as an expense that must be minimized. There is virtually no opportunity for advancement; once you are hired, you're pretty much put into a box which is impossible to escape. Knowledge you bring and share about products and services, corporate development, process development and corporate quality will be considered irrelevant and obstructionist. The internal process for defining products revolve around satisfying the CEO's latest whim without regard to good user interface principles, good product design, quality of the released products, or the appropriate means for delivering the products. There is no cross-functional program management. There are no executive staff meetings -- the CEO will tell you what he wants you to know about what is going on in other departments. Although these statements could apply to many companies, APCON elevates them to an art form.