Pros
You get to work with some high caliber clients Great, highly capable individual contributors Fast-paced environment, never a dull moment You are treated well if you are in a non-operations role like sales or development
Cons
Clearwater's culture has changed dramatically, for the worse, over the last few years under Sandeep's leadership. Under the guise of bringing in experience, highly knowledgeable and inspirational Clearwater leaders with valuable institutional knowledge are being passed over for "industry experience" hires. To that vein, a number of Genpact people that worked with Sandeep previously have been placed in senior leadership roles, some of which make no sense. For example, why is Clearwater's Chief Client officer located in India when nearly all of our clients are in the US and Europe? Leadership isn't listening to its employees. Instead they look at faulty data, and there have been several anecdotes where employee sentiment is discounted vs what the "timesheets" data is saying. Yes, under Sandeeps leadership everybody tracks their time. There used to be a value around "owning the solution", taking initiative and solving a problem that you see needs solved. The coaching that operations now gets is "stay in your lane", and anything you do differently needs to be cleared through multiple levels of management which goes nowhere. The value of "self organizing teams" has gone out the window. Innovation in operations has come to a standstill. People used to be able to move fairly freely through the organization if they are looking for a change. Now it requires approvals which in turn is causing people to look externally vs internally. Performance Management scores are now on a forced distribution, so if you have a team of high performers, somebody is still getting a 1. Clearwater's #1 priority used to be client success. Now the number 1 priority is to keep gross margin up so the company is valued well for an IPO and Welsh Carson, Sandeep, and his friends get a magnificent payout at the expense of an overworked and understaffed workforce. The operation in general is in poor shape. The middle managers are leaving in droves as their health and families take major tolls due to the demands from operational and software failures out of their control. The system has been in poor shape for months, fraying operations people as they have to work around the clock to make up for system shortfalls. Another office was started in India but the training of the staff is poor, and it seems nobody thought through how the US, UK, and India would operate as a cohesive group. Clients are left to train their own reconcilers. Open and honest feedback is encouraged publicly, but retaliated against privately to the point of bullying and verging on lawsuit material. Development releases are slower than ever, implementations are slower than ever, and while sales is going gangbusters, there is not the staff to implement the solution. We are coached to trust in our leaders, but our leaders offer no solutions and are taking no action to make the operational situation better.
