Sad to say, but this company is a joke...
Pros
The office facility is new.
Cons
For those of you who are looking for a job for the first time and need to add some experience in your resume, this is probably a good place for you to start. However, don't plan on staying that long so you won't acquire bad work ethics and habits. This place is full of pointing fingers and throwing people under the bus to save their jobs. For those of you who are experienced applicants, skip this company all together and keep on looking. Don't be deceived by the high salary offer because in 3 months if the owner doesn't like your personality, not by merit, for whatever reason, she will find a way to let you go. I saw it time and time again...good talents from impressive company backgrounds came and left, either by choice or not. As a matter of fact, this company is having the hardest time hiring, so now their hiring approach is to hire contractors. So what makes this company so bad? For one, it is a mom and pop operation so the owners and selected favorites play god. They make decision out of a whim, no forethought or strategy, but just because. The “innovators” are either family members or favorites. To be a favorite, the owner would have to personally like you because you cater to all her whims, you put in at least 70 hours per week, you’re able to translate complicated topics to elementary terms or you’re connected to someone in the company that the owner likes. Once you’re in any of these qualifiers, then it’s your ticket of getting promoted to roles that you’re normally not qualified to do in reputable companies, which by the way minimizes their peers who truly are “innovators” and come from professional organizations. Otherwise, if you accidentally say a word that the owner does not like, if you describe a concept that the owner is not able to grasp or if you’re an introvert, then that becomes forever encrypted in the owner’s mind and you’re automatically in her hit list. If you teach them a little bit of something, they come back as if they are the subject matter experts. Rather than utilizing and leveraging the talents that they hire, they end up being micromanaged, forced to perform made up tasks (not professionally recognized) and/or become the owner’s puppets. There is no structure in delivering projects. A couple of upper management talents came and tried implementing an industry recognized software development methodology, but did not succeed because it was not fully supported. Rather than seeing the overall benefit and embracing the change, it was skipped out of convenience. HR is not fully respected in this company. They are simply treated like admins to do payroll and/or recruit because of the frequency of people quitting or getting fired. So if you’re an employee that is mistreated or having some challenges with any of the favorites then your only option is to quit or guaranteed you will be fired. The owner was overly optimistic. Not really sure if it was done on purpose to falsely create a “stable” company future or she was just purely clueless, but regardless she tried landing a contract with some company that was connected with a well-known tech company and with the government; and prematurely announced in her town meeting that she landed the deal, but in actuality it was just an inquiry and demo activities. She obviously was oblivious of what it took to negotiate with bigger companies and/or government. The Clarifire product can definitely do some impressive functionality, but it is poorly designed in the back-end. The spaghetti code breaks every time something is fixed resulting to weekly and sometimes even daily releases. There are no future plans of re-engineering. The company focused on the mortgage industry and for a while rode the foreclosure wave, but now that this industry is improving, the existing clients are cutting down. They are now trying to get in the health industry. My only advice is to reach out to the existing clients and hear what they have to say. Don’t talk to the ones that Clarifire gives as a reference, do your homework. Some of their clients are still existing because their day-to-day workflow processes have been configured in Clarifire, making getting off of the product an expensive endeavor so their general strategy is to wean out of any additional development work. So where did all of the positive comments come from about this company? I do know for a fact that they are orchestrated mainly to boost the company ratings here. If you notice, the dates are between 3 – 5 business days apart and all from current employees. They are from executive assistants and loyal worker bees that were ask to write something positive about the company.
