CompuSystems reviews

The pros are pretty much your co-workers that will help you or offer you a shoulder to cry. There is one review here that made me laugh so hard because this person had the full CSI experience “A sinking ship, don't even bother.” Fully illustrates the life of a programmer or developer and two other reviews were very informative “Don't waste your time and skills here. CSI is not a place for career growth.” And “CSI needs to get it together” CONS Consistent lay offs Lose a client, lose staff roller coaster (someday commented this and I couldn’t agree more). Little or No training. Revolving Door (here today and gone tomorrow) sometimes you don’t even get a chance to meet that person assigned to your team! Most positions required to put in long hours, work weekends and be on call. Everybody was in a salary freeze for 3 years. If you get a raise (that if you get one), prepare for a 1% or 1.5% (and it will never match the cost of living) be happy with that or no raises ever. They can start another salary freeze at any time so don’t push it. Negative environment, most people there hate it, frustration and stress is on the roof! At least everybody has something in common right? I can't think of any pros that were beneficial to me in a personal or professional way. As many here mentioned, technology is outdated, custom made and the experience you gain here can’t be applied in other companies. I am seeing positive 4 and 5 star reviews of the company here and that makes me think that management is desperately trying to increase their ratings by writing some reviews themselves or were made by new employees within their first months or year that have not yet experienced the big waves that will soon hit them. People would continually leave and they would not be replaced, some are replaced by new graduates that would instantly quit once they had a feeling for the departments, the stress and the long hours. No real advancement opportunities, I have seen people in the same position for many years. When they promote people, they usually play favoritism. They promote who they like and not who is best prepared for the position. This is why they lose many talented people. Most promotions are just lateral moves, you get a new title and you are given more responsibilities. The only increase you get is an increase in your workload. Forget about that raise/incentive for your new position “you should be happy with your fancy title!” I think of many examples of people who had these “promotions” but I rather don’t say anything and maintain these examples anonymous for their own good. When people leave, they don’t fill the position. They give you all of the responsibilities with no financial incentive. Call this "an opportunity to prove yourself". No, even if you managed to do it, don’t even think they will give you a promotion. You just proved you can take more work and that's what they will give you, more work. I have a lot of ESM friends. Some have quit and some are still in the company. My advice to you is to think it twice because if you have kids, this position may not be for you. This position requires working after hours and some weekends if you are in a project or onsite and the position requires a good amount of travel. Most ESM’s are either recently graduated young girls or single women. Everything is all good until they marry or decide to have kids and that’s when problems start, when you want to spend more time with your kid or significant other and that’s not possible because of your job. This is why many quit or don’t come back from maternity leave. The veterans ESM’s who have been with the company for so long either have grown up kids or are working part-time, a privilege for a very few. If you are looking for a work-life balance position, this is probably not for you.

I mentioned above that the employees are generally easy-going and approachable. The problem is none of these good folks are in significant leadership positions. Company leadership is severely lacking. While I was working there, I could count the number of times I'd seen my manager in any given month on one finger, at most. Anyone above him? Forget it, I wouldn't know who they were if they slapped me in the face. The way I see it, this company has two key problems: 1. Severely outdated, frustrating, and bizarre standards for development combined with insane, horribly fragile and inefficient business processes 2. All these inefficiencies and frustrations lead to an enormous backlog of work that never goes away because they don't have enough people to cover everything, and the company couldn't care less about retaining the employees they do have. People are REALLY stressed out as a result in many departments. The amount of profanity I heard people using there is kind of crazy, and there seems to be some serious pent-up hostility between many departments here. It's hard to know whether upper management doesn't know about this, or if they do and they just don't CARE. Outside of the token employee wellness gestures above, I often got the sense the Compusystems just doesn't care about its employees, or worse yet, actively hates them. I had this impression from the very first day when I saw the office I'd be working in, which would have looked old and dismal over 30 years ago. Communication at lower levels can be pretty lousy, too. I remember one stretch of about two weeks when I sat idle with no idea what I was supposed to work on until I told another developer about it, who just happened to have some idea of what was going on. They've been around for over 30 years, but there's no drive to do things the RIGHT way here. Apparently they've built their success on three decades of following awful or nonexistent practices and praying every day that they don't come crashing to the ground. In 2012, they froze raises for EVERYBODY because they decided to hire some "consultants" for an unspecified large sum of money. For a while, I thought they had taken the money and run off laughing to the bank. However, in October of that year, they announced a whole bunch of changes, including a ton of layoffs. If it sounds like something that fell right out of Office Space, on some level, that's what it was. Turnover is sky high in all departments except management. I saw people last for less than six months and people who had been with the company for over a decade leaving, voluntarily or involuntarily, in my short time there. The whole company kind of seems to be falling apart, both figuratively and even literally. The roof leaks and water soaks through to the ceiling panels on the 2nd floor when it rains heavily. Sometime last year, two panels fell out of the ceiling and better yet, the company doesn't rent out that particular area, so who knows when they'll be fixed, if ever? It's one of the great mysteries of the universe how this company makes money, in my opinion. The only reasonable theory I have for why they're still in business at all is that there's little or no significant competition on the services they provide. In any other industry, more efficient, innovative competitors would boot Compusystems out of the market so fast they wouldn't know what hit them. Stay away!