Be cautious in regards to what management says. Lack of growth opportunities - Quality Engineer Alarm.com Employee Review

Edit: the formatting didn't get pushed with the review. "----" is a topic and "__" is my experience to support the most recent topic. My perspective and experience. When talking to others in the department, I realized some of these points are not limited to me. ---- lack of growth opportunities __You can put in more hours, but you're likely to just get the next set of regressions that much sooner. It's tedious and monotonous work. You're not learning anything new, because it's the same thing over and over again. __There may be other projects that they say you can try to work on, but because quality engineers are understaffed, it now seems like a facade. The company is more focused on getting other engineers to push for innovation and praise them, but don't want to staff the quality engineering team, making the quality engineers a bottleneck to be stuck in an endless loop of regressions. There are a handful of quality engineers that do work on innovating projects, but the vast majority are just testing software and device engineers work. ---- lack of promotions and what appears to be a non-competitive salary __Even if you deserve a promotion, if they want to give it to someone else, you may get passed over for a long time. __The raises don't seem to match up, if you get the short end of the stick and start at a lower point, you'll always be behind regardless of your responsibilities. (especially test analysts and quality associates that move up to quality engineer) __Unclear/difficult promotion requirements. They made up some generic list of requirements that some people may never meet. Because of the lackluster project they're on they may never get the opportunity to fulfill those requirements or because they won't go back to school to earn an engineering degree. ---- overall compensation is discouraging __Many of the aspects of compensation seem to have "vesting periods". You get a stock award? That's 5 years for full vesting. You want your 401k? 5 years for full vesting. (it's also limited to a match of $4000 per year. I'm not sure how other companies compare, but I didn't like that.) You get a raise? You may have gotten half of your raise now and the other half at a later date. It all just seems like a psychological attempt to keep people around, only because they're waiting for the compensation that is always in the future. __They like to throw out a big number for overall compensation, but the vast majority of employees may not utilize most of it. ---- complacency is easy __It's a really relaxed environment and that's nice, but it's easy to lose track of the days doing the same tasks and not progressing. Some quality engineers kept hearing that a promotion was on the horizon, from managers. The thing is, they kept getting lead on. ---- reduced number of company events __As the company got bigger, the events started to taper off. This isn't a major point for me, but it conflicts with numerous other reviews. --- Management gives empty promises or half truths. __Unless they say how the're going about a situation and the timeline with detail, be cautious because you may be lead on and waste your time. There were numerous associates that kept hearing that they were going to receive compensation that reflects their work or that the project would see restructuring in order to distribute the workload, but it either never happens or it takes too long. __There was another instance where associates were leaving the team and management approached some of the remaining employees and asked them to stay and that raises/promotions were coming. This was after those remaining associates were already waiting for compensation for a long time and already receiving the short end of the stick. --- Executive level management also stated that they expected more attrition. Who knows what that person meant by it. I took it as they are purposely putting poor conditions on some of the positions and not caring to fix it. Which would give employees the incentive to leave, if they acknowledged it, but they aren't leaving. I may be overly biased, but there was no context on why he thinks there would've been more attrition.