Applied Systems reviews

The company has these signs all over the place saying that the company has these Core Values and that we always need to strive to be our best and do the right thing, yet, once you are hired, you are pretty much shoehorned into a Support position with little to no career path. There are several other departments within the company that if you're lucky enough to get into, you can get a nice salary bump that would otherwise take you 4-5 years to equal in minuscule pay raises. Employees who really bust their butts get very similar raises to people who come in, do the bare minimum and keep their heads low. If you challenge management about raises, they'll tell you that Applied pays comparatively to the industry. The average raise throughout support is 3%. Some people will get more, some will get less. Lets say you start at $30k. A 3% raise is $900. So, after one year, you'll be making $30,900. They'll probably bump you to $1000 if you did a good job. So now you're making $31k. Next year, another $900. This time, they wont bump you, so youre at $31.900. Then the next year its $32,800. Maybe you did really good and got promoted and they gave you an extra $250. So now youre at $33,050. The point is, at this rate, if you stay in Support, it will take you 8-10 years to increase your salary by $10k. If you started at Applied fresh out of college, at 22, thats not so bad. But if you stayed there 10 years, you are now 32. You're probably married, and have a house, maybe you have kids. Assuming you're the breadwinner, $40k is not going to cut it for a 32 year old supporting a family. The point Im making here is that Applied treats it's support techs like dead end job workers. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to stay beyond a couple of years. And maybe thats what the company wants? The problem with that, is that Applied's primary product is extremely old. It was designed in the 80s, and although its received many updates over the years, it still runs on dBase III which is an extremely outdated platform. Applied also supports most of their older versions. You can still be on support for a version of their product that is from the very early 2000s. So, if Applied has no interest in keeping support techs for a long time, how do they plan on supporting their old products for so long? I mentioned Reid being a nice guy. The problem with Reid is that unlike Applied's former CEO, Jim Kellner who worked his way up at Applied and was passionate about the company, Reid is just a hired hand brought in by Applied's former owner Bain Capital (yes, the same one associated with Mitt Romney). The University Park office used to be the corporate headquarters, yet Mr French lives in Atlanta. So does pretty much every other member of the executive staff. There is an article on the Internet right now from the Atlanta Journal Constitution saying the company just bought a new building and is planning on hiring an additional 150 people. Has any of this been mentioned to the people in the UP office? No. Ask a member of management about it and they say they dont know what you're talking about, but they do. Like I said, Reid is a nice guy. Ive heard him talk and he's a great speaker, but I have absolutely no faith that he's in this for the long run. His job is to make Applied profitable and once he does that, he'll move onto other things. For the people in the UP office who feel that everything is still business as usual, its not. The building we work in is rented from someone else (the previous owners of the company actually), and the lease is up in 2019. Some reports originally said it was 2016, but now they say 2019. Does that mean the UP building will close in 2019? I have no idea. But it doesn't look good. The entire management team is in Atlanta, they're expanding there, plus with Bruce Rauner's recent claims to cut funding for the whole state, I bet Applied's owners are looking at the Illinois office as a less than ideal location. I can't speak for other areas of the company, but in support, the techs are overworked. There is always a shortage of staff, people rarely stay longer than 2-3 years which is either due to burnout, or getting a better offer somewhere else. There is little incentive to want to keep your career at Applied.

Crappy training and an extreme lack of communication within and between different departments. Nobody knows what the heck is going on. Communication to customers on inconsistent issues with product implementation is difficult because why it's not working is not understood. Sales also doesn't know what the products do some of the time and make implementation look like idiots when the client says "what do you mean it doesn't do that?" Or "I didn't know I needed that". Then there is a delay and you get in trouble with management, because the reports are off and they want to know why it's not completed. Well sorry the customer drives the speed of the implementation, whether management wants to admit it or not. We cannot force clients to answer right away. If they are busy, they are busy. Hello???? The entire economy is overworked, and those that have jobs are very busy and struggle to complete items that are not their #1 priority. If they are paying for the product and not answering the phone, oh well. 40 hour work week is not enough time to get work done, and extra time needs to be put in to complete work.