'House of cards' still standing - Senior Developer FEI Systems Employee Review

2.0
Apr 12, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

No micromanagement, good place for people with vision and initiative. Flexible work hours at the moment.

Cons

Company has very tight deadlines. Overtime is expected and not compensated. Very weak BAs which leads to low quality product/code. Lots of band-aids. Top management disconnected from their teams. looks at people as numbers in spreadsheet. Habitually understaffed with so few real senior experts. Company is very cheap: no basic supplies such plates, tea etc. Inconvenient location, you have to drive to get lunch. Very weak on employee training programs if you are lucky enough to get a license to training site, you are expected to learn at your own free time...after you work overtime.

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FEI Systems Response
8y
Thank you for your response. We have brought in more senior technical talent to provide a higher level of expertise to our projects and mentor our junior and mid-level team members.

Explore other reviews about FEI Systems

5.0
Oct 17, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It's very stable here. With a lot of opportunity to grow.

Cons

Hard to push for improvement but still doable.

3.0
May 27, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Solid pay for experience - Mostly friendly team, including most co-workers and supervisors - Good health insurance options - Fully remote - Company paid for the work computer - Minor perks like "points" in the company store, which had some cute items - Big picture work was meaningful

Cons

- Disorganized training and unclear / contradictory instructions at times - Challenging to get in contact with certain people who have information necessary to do the job. - Communication overall could be much clearer. - Information storage was disorganized. - Small scale, an entire day's work on a section of a proposal could be pointless, entirely thrown out. -- Sometimes this was because the original instructions on how to fill out the section were outdated or incomplete. -- In other cases, the assignment turned out to be redundant. -- At least twice in my tenure of just under a year, the team spent over a week on a proposal, only to be told to scrap the whole thing because the company didn't want to bid on it after all. --- Over time this became pretty demoralizing, at least to me. - One or two highly stressful coworkers / supervisors could create conflict that created a bad "vibe" for the whole day (or week!) - Company prioritized shallow means of boosting morale (cookie party, etc) over doing the time-consuming work to truly improve it. --- That is, no one seemed to be taking the time to figure out what systems or which individuals were the frequent source of conflict / demoralization, and address those with real solutions. Unfortunately, the negative experiences with communication and high-stress team members / leaders led me to leave. Ultimately, I took a writing job at a different company that paid less but had a better team atmosphere. It was worth it. Note: For all I know this may be fixed now. Per LinkedIn, many of the people I worked with (both competent, easygoing people and high-conflict stress-adders) seem to have moved on. So, perhaps the culture has changed positively. You'd probably have to ask someone who's worked there more recently, though.

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