Mixed management experience with outdated systems and low pay
Pros
some managers were nice, some level of schedule flexibility and overtime opportunity, some cool coworkers, the new office is nice, free food when working holidays, being put up in a hotel when there is a snowstorm.
Cons
The older office was a nightmare before they build the new one in 2019. That one had rats in the kitchen on occasion. The older office also had chairs, keyboards, mice & monitors that were not ergonomic for a job that requires sitting still for 6+ hours. The rate of pay when I started was not great either. That was in the 2010s but pay increases rarely reflected cost of living, and most of the time did not really increase. In the DMV area the starting pay should be at least $27/hour. I know that the company hires non-college graduates, but this is a realistic rate of pay for this area. They also had "accrued" vacation hours which should just become fixed vacation per year (3-4 weeks). There were actual discussions of unionization when I worked there. The middle management has/had some nice people, while some others were mysteriously demoted without cause. I think that this caused resentment from those demoted people. I feel like upper management doesn't really understand what happens on the ground, we rarely saw Billy Peel or anyone else from upper mgmt. There were certainly no 1-on-1s with him. The company (while I worked there) coasted on having a de-facto monopoly on office properties in the DMV area. After I left, I learned that due to covid, these offices went vacant and shut down. Now Datawatch has mostly southern clients, and I'm assuming that they do not know any better. The software & hardware is/was straight out of the early 2000's. You had hair-trigger door alarms set up by default, which meant that Central Station had to call on every faulty alarm until the customer got sick of it. Why it operated that way for so long is a mystery to me. Please work on this if it is still an issue.
