Argo Data reviews

-Senior management very disconnected, opaque, closed-doors, and unstable. Upper management does not know what is going on in lower levels and don't seem to care. -Resistant to innovation and change. Most of the base ARGO systems and software consists of 20-25 year old, poorly documented, spaghetti code in C or C++, and most of the client systems are build on either a 20 year old proprietary language or a newer proprietary web application framework that is not stable, not well documented, and mostly word-of-mouth knowledge. -Many teams still use ARGO's propriety language, which is outdated and completely useless outside of the company. -20% of the company laid off in December 2013 with no warning, despite their apparently very large cash reserve and after a massive volume of hiring in the last year. -No to little reward for meeting or exceeding expectations. Sometimes promotions don't even come with a salary raise. Promotions that do involve a raise are usually insignificant or even insulting. -Relatively low salaries, below industry and area average. -Little to no culture. Despite the best efforts of some employees, there is not an exciting or fun corporate culture here, and many employees are like drones. -Bad cross-team communication and collaboration. Differences in priorities makes getting resources from or collaborating with other teams like pulling teeth and basically requires an order from senior managers to get anything done. -Lack of talent. Many of the talented or even average employees leave because they can find better jobs elsewhere, and many of the ones that stay (but definitely not all) are arrogant and not easy to work with. So you are left with a lot of under-performers, some average and talented but arrogant employees, spattered with a small group of friendly and talented employees. -Bad company outlook. The only thing keeping the company up is the fact that its products are already so entangled with large banks that it would be very costly to go somewhere else. -Bad career advancement opportunities. It is not a meritocracy, and advancement is largely dependent on the people you know or sheer luck (in my case, both). -Very bureaucratic. The review process is overly structured, takes too long, and is largely dependent upon having the right flowery wording and hitting certain buzz words. It takes 2-4 months to even get feedback from reviews or for promotions to be decided. The CEO has to approve all promotions, which wouldn't be bad if he knew who he was promoting and didn't take 3 months to approve it. -Lack of trust between senior management and managers. The senior management does not trust their managers to make the right decisions and manage their teams correctly, leading to drawn out approval processes, lack of communication, differing expectations and priorities, and disregard for input by the managers who actually know the people working for them.

• Low salary. Real or perceived. According to indeed to Indeed.com the average salary for an ELP in JavaScript in Dallas is $59,000. The average for JavaScript developers with experience is $82,000. The Starting salary at ARGO is $48,000. • Lack of Cost of living raises. Cost of living changes a lot year to year. Apartment rent increases and so do many other bills. Raises based on merit end up being equivalent to cost of living raises. • Lack of opportunities for advancement. Advancement is often based on opportunity. If you are on a small team and your boss was recently promoted it is difficult to get the required opportunities that are need to advance. • Inability to switch to a different team. The only people who seem to be able to switch teams are poor performers. People who are excelling are unable to move around. Many people want to move to a different team but are unable to. • Working with ADS (A 30 year old propriety language.). It is drop down menu driver and is difficult to navigate. This is a real issue for most programmers. No one wants to work with something that can’t help their career outside the company. • Working with poorly structured code. ARGO should use design patterns such as MVP or MVC, but currently the code is big ball of mud. • Working seven days a week for several months or not having work for months. Many projects have too much work and others have too little work. There is no balance. • Fear that concerns will not be heard by upper management. ARGO is supposed to be a flat company but most employees have never met or even seen our senior manager before. • Seeing people get fired and not know why. People want to know there job is safe. Seeing others fired and having no clue as to why it happened is concerning. Going along with this there are always rumors about why someone was let go (Such as chronic tardiness, poor code, etc.), but it seems like if that was the reason they were fired then many other people here should be fired. There is definitely a problem with people getting fired because there manager does not like them while other people are being retained because there manager likes them. Clashes in personality should not be a reason to be fired. • Poor communication/lack of care by senior managers. I was once in a meeting where a senior manager said that raises and bonuses during the last few years were not deserved. Also telling employees that there is $190 million dollars in the bank while laying off 20% of the work force just tells the employees that management cares more about money than people. • Corporate Culture. Because of low morale the corporate culture suffers. People come in late, they take long lunches, they leave early and they do not put a full effort into their job. This is the norm here. Many people start out working hard but once they see that no one else does, they become lazy too. This culture of not working a full 8 hours starts in training. During training new hires typically only spend 6-7 hours at work. • Layoffs 2 weeks before Christmas.