I mentioned above that the employees are generally easy-going and approachable. The problem is none of these good folks are in significant leadership positions. Company leadership is severely lacking. While I was working there, I could count the number of times I'd seen my manager in any given month on one finger, at most. Anyone above him? Forget it, I wouldn't know who they were if they slapped me in the face. The way I see it, this company has two key problems:
1. Severely outdated, frustrating, and bizarre standards for development combined with insane, horribly fragile and inefficient business processes
2. All these inefficiencies and frustrations lead to an enormous backlog of work that never goes away because they don't have enough people to cover everything, and the company couldn't care less about retaining the employees they do have.
People are REALLY stressed out as a result in many departments. The amount of profanity I heard people using there is kind of crazy, and there seems to be some serious pent-up hostility between many departments here. It's hard to know whether upper management doesn't know about this, or if they do and they just don't CARE. Outside of the token employee wellness gestures above, I often got the sense the Compusystems just doesn't care about its employees, or worse yet, actively hates them. I had this impression from the very first day when I saw the office I'd be working in, which would have looked old and dismal over 30 years ago. Communication at lower levels can be pretty lousy, too. I remember one stretch of about two weeks when I sat idle with no idea what I was supposed to work on until I told another developer about it, who just happened to have some idea of what was going on. They've been around for over 30 years, but there's no drive to do things the RIGHT way here. Apparently they've built their success on three decades of following awful or nonexistent practices and praying every day that they don't come crashing to the ground.
In 2012, they froze raises for EVERYBODY because they decided to hire some "consultants" for an unspecified large sum of money. For a while, I thought they had taken the money and run off laughing to the bank. However, in October of that year, they announced a whole bunch of changes, including a ton of layoffs. If it sounds like something that fell right out of Office Space, on some level, that's what it was. Turnover is sky high in all departments except management. I saw people last for less than six months and people who had been with the company for over a decade leaving, voluntarily or involuntarily, in my short time there. The whole company kind of seems to be falling apart, both figuratively and even literally. The roof leaks and water soaks through to the ceiling panels on the 2nd floor when it rains heavily. Sometime last year, two panels fell out of the ceiling and better yet, the company doesn't rent out that particular area, so who knows when they'll be fixed, if ever? It's one of the great mysteries of the universe how this company makes money, in my opinion. The only reasonable theory I have for why they're still in business at all is that there's little or no significant competition on the services they provide. In any other industry, more efficient, innovative competitors would boot Compusystems out of the market so fast they wouldn't know what hit them. Stay away!
