I was considered a mid level employee in the EPS group. I worked there long enough to live through the acquisition of printCafe and EFI, only to finally realize this business was a death march. The culture is SPRINT, and each letter stands for something each employee is conditioned to believe. The biggest laugh of the whole acronym is the T in SPRINT stands for Transparency, but, EFI is anything but transparent. People come on board and you are rarely informed. People leave, either on their own or through a reduction in force, and you are never informed. The transparency is centered around the constant drilling in your head to SPRINT to a billion dollars in revenue, find every drop of revenue, locate any and every engagement you can call off at month end/quarter end, and most importantly, don’t ask questions because they will go unanswered.
There is so much internal fighting and back stabbing between the products. Monarch, Radius, Pace in the US, the staffers are constantly fighting to keep their product relevant in the eyes of the sales team and management. Everyone says their product does what “so and so” does and this leaves a very green and undereducated sales team confused and left to determine what is the best fit for a client. In the end, no one wins. The client is sold the wrong system, the client is unhappy, and ultimately, EFI is left giving concessions in order to keep the client on the roster. The sales team in EPS is in a constant state of reorganization. At a minimum, there’s a change every year, in 2016, there’s been at least 2 major changes to the structure of the team, one in January and one in July. Don’t worry about it, keep SPRINTing and reach $1 billion!
I worked in a remote office, not Foster City/Fremont, and the upper management in our office was next to nothing. None of the team members I worked with had a direct manager in the office. We had no HR representation and no IS&T staff on site. Every day was a struggle if the servers went haywire, a workstation went kaput, the phones went offline, or someone was severed from the company, as these tasks were handled by someone inside the building, and most likely it was front line employees to did the server, workstation, phone repairs and the “building manager” handled the reduction process with HR on the phone from Pittsburgh.
For EPS, Pittsburgh is the epicenter. If you don’t work in Pittsburgh, you don’t matter, unless there’s a pressing client issue, then you’re on the hot seat to resolve it. The staff in Pittsburgh is heavy on Prograph and marketing, but, when it comes time to reduce the workforce, the final decision comes from, you guessed it, Pittsburgh, so rarely, do you see the staff in Pittsburgh affected when Fremont decides to cut costs, and it is very rare that it is someone from the Prograph core employee base.
The promoting of management is done either by favoritism or because someone has been there the longest. There is little consideration of the person’s ability, or desire, to be a manager or director. The typical interaction you have with your manager in during your weekly, and that is mostly your opportunity to sit quietly and let your manager tell you how busy they are, overworked they are, and that you are lucky you don’t have to deal with all their issues.
Every month there seems to be a new senior manager or senior director. This is a great company for Kodak employees to land, it is almost a vacation for Vancouver staffers. The number of layers from the front line employee who interacts with the customer to the CEO is laughable. In some groups, it can be 7 or 8 layers of management. This person reports to this manager who reports to that manager who reports to that manager who reports to another manager who reports to the CEO. And all the while, the layers of overhead are constantly trying to show their value in EPS when they can’t even begin to explain how any of the application works, let alone solve a customer’s issue.
As people leave, either through a reduction or voluntarily, there is rarely any effort to replace the staffer. Instead, the company looks at the savings and gives the workload to the remaining team members. The people who are left are either too afraid to speak up and call out how overwhelmed they are, or they are just biding their time until they can exit the company. With each departure, years, if not decades, of knowledge goes out the door and senior management has no idea how to back fill all the experience.
Every time the company buys up a company, you’re left with trying to figure out what the management has in store to “connect” yet another product to the suite. Do the due diligence when you swallow up a company, really look at how that product will fit into the culture of the company, and be up front with the acquired company. If they are not going to be viable going forward, tell them that from day one, instead of leaving staff members blowing in the wind with the impression you bought them because their product is the greatest product ever when in reality, they were purchased because it helps the underlying goal of reaching $1 billion in sales.
