AmTrust Software Developer reviews

The biggest problem Amtrust faces is the upper management. As an insurance company, they place IT near the bottom of the stack. At the end of 2017, Amtrust began a large reorganization effort, for IT this means cost cutting! In 2018, we had a large layoff at the beginning of the year, lousy pay raises, and many senior developers began leaving with no effort on Amtrust's part to either hold onto these people with a pay raise or even to back fill these positions with new hires! All this, without any transparency on the part of upper managements. All in all, it feels like Amtrust is trying to pull the rug out from under their IT department!

Forgive me for being ambiguous for some parts of this, but pretty much all of this is going to boil down to "Ariel is creating a gloomy environment where many of us are expecting another round of layoffs," so I can't go too much into detail otherwise I'll state confidential information. Recently, Ariel Gorelik, the new CIO, announced to the that the company is going to be selling off and outsourcing some of its IT infrastructure, and consolidating some of its IT. Whenever he was asked about this, Ariel responded that those of us "good at our jobs" didn't have anything to worry about, but the whole time we were left in the dark as to HOW management was to evaluate us. Currently, the company asks that employees fill out timesheets through two programs, one per-project, and the other more or less per-department. However, in order to log our time for a project, the project head needs to add us to it, and since the system is designed to keep us in the dark, half the freakin' time we aren't made aware of who the project head is! What should take 15 minutes can easily drag into hours because of us requiring to relearn how to fill in a timesheet because Ariel found a new toy online and wanted to throw money at it. This was the same man who delivered a 100-member layoff last year, without explaining what evaluation they used, telling us that they were going to start evaluating us again, while reducing the size of IT, following the company going private. I had a coworker, sweet young lady who constantly gets yelled at by business because of that Wim Hovens quote, break down later that night and through the rest of the workweek until we talked about all of her worries, because she saw what was on the wall. I know people who quit months after the last layoff Ariel delivered because Ariel failed to make those of us that stayed confident in our futures with Amtrust, among them people whom I can't even say their titles of, for fear of inviting backlash against their professional careers. I still work with people, brilliant people, who are preparing to leave, or would happily sign up for a round of layoffs just because it means not waiting for the one afterwards. When I look at my workstation, I see men and women, both more powerful and smarter than I am, repeating what my own gut is telling me. Maybe in a couple years, this will blow over, but in the meantime, that weight of doom will be sitting with every pause in work, every second waiting for a business analyst to get back to me, every meeting, every elevator ride... every quiet moment... and whenever you're sitting there for 8 hours a day in front of a computer, you get a lot of quiet moments...