5y
Dev Team Member,
Thank you for your response. I am hopeful you are sharing these suggestions and opinions not only on Glassdoor but through our open door policy. During orientation, I share our open door policy and my personal commitment to every employee to be a resource to them. Not only do I say it, I provide contact information for myself and every member of the leadership team. Based on your comments, I am fairly confident that you are a relatively new employee, but more importantly, I am 100% concerned about your experience with Dev and wonder how I might be able to help you now that your concerns have reached me. However, to help, you will need to reach out to me directly.
In an effort to address some of your concerns, here goes. I, as the CEO, own our Growth Strategy and am involved in every bid/ no bid decision. We do not bid widely, we bid strategically and our win rate is above industry average (for government IT services companies). I'm happy to walk through the process and the data including the bid rate and win rate statistics if you would like to discuss.
In terms of our organizational structure we do not have "products" so we do not have "product managers" instead, we have Project and Program Managers since we offer IT services customized to our clients needs. In many cases our team structure is required to align to our client requirements for the team as specified in the Request for Proposal (if you would like, I'm happy to walk through one of those with you as well). However, I do agree that we should have a clear technical lead on each project, if that is not happening on your project we should remedy that.
In terms of innovation, patents do not often define innovation in the government services contracting space which is where we align. For our clients, innovation is about finding new and better ways to implement for the government. The government owns what they buy, so anything we develop for the government is owned by them. While we can offer process innovation and solutions that can be applied to their requirements, their requirements drive the work, so we have to meet them where they are. If we wanted to be a more product centered company, I agree that patents would be appropriate, but we are not playing in the product space.
Finally, I'd like to address the title of your post, "not for young professionals". It is true, we have not historically had many positions for those professionals within 5 years of college graduation, but over the past few years that has drastically changed. So much so, that two years ago we launched a group for those early in their careers within the company that is sponsored by me and funded. The DENizens are self organizing with all Dev employees 30 and under as members. They plan both professional and social programs and events. The reach out to every employee in that demographic, but it is up to each employee to engage with them. We are not perfect, but we are attempting to have our "DENizens" help us continue to mature as a company that is a great place to work for all of our current and future employees.
I'd love an opportunity to talk to you and work through your areas of concern and give you some context about the business you recently joined. Please reach out to me, I'm on Teams all day and you have my phone numbers and email.
Sincerely,
Kendall
