CN reviews

Look at how the Glassdoor ratings for the CN IT department has plummeted over the last two years (from 3.5 stars in 2018 to 2.5 stars currently), and you'll have a feeling of how things are going. Been at CN for over 6 years, and in the past three year we started seeing a shift in the management style and it started to feel like IT was no longer valued at the corporate level. Instead it was being treated as an expense that needed to be minimized. Management style and direction keeps shifting, as the last 2 CIOs did not last more than 2 years each. Recent layoffs decided by upper management resulted in valued IT employees being removed from underneath managers without prior consultation. IT employees were being treated as disposable and no effort was made in trying to boost employee morale. We saw significant cost cutting initiatives in the IT department and investment in employees was reduced to bare minimum (e.g. increasing costs to IT Christmas Parties, Activity days, cutting of the Bravo recognition program and no celebration of delivery milestones). Work culture took a turn for the worse as we were forced to deliver more with less, and often with impossible timelines that resulted in overtime work during long weekend holidays and solutions being designed during implementation. Quality of work was being tossed to the side, and it was difficult to find any pride what we do. Large influx of new projects and technologies were being handed to contractors while project management and structure was poor. Low quality work was delivered due to impossible delivery timelines, and once the contractors left, permanent staff was left to deal with the chaos.

Toxic workplace culture. Power games and intrigue beyond everything, even project goals. Absolutely no respect towards employees, without regard of your value, experience, etc. Amateur management only cares about their ego. Constant danger of being fired for BS reasons. Employees must watch their every step. I was fired because I needed a placeholder image on a sample page and used a cat picture. This was a reason for immediate termination for "inappropriate and unprofessional conduct". A terrible waste of money and resources. A software project that'd be normally 2-3 weeks for a single person is implemented in 6-8 months. Time is wasted on endless and pointless meetings instead of meaningful work. Horribly disorganized project. Management is pitting teams from various competing talent agencies against each other - on the same project! "Security" is a major blocker day by day. We spent a whole month without computers until someone finally approved that we can get it. 6 months into the project we still couldn't run unit tests because it was blocked by the corporate proxy and nobody knew who's responsible.