Don't Waste Your Time . . . - Senior Implementation Specialist MICROS Systems Employee Review

I worked out of one of the largest (sales-wise) field offices in the US, programming almost exclusively the RES 3700 system. The system itself was impressive, and had a lot of capabilities that were difficult to implement due to a lack of usable documentation, bugs, lack of internal expertise in implementations, and an unwritten company policy to keep everything as simple as possible so that incompetent help desk personnel could support it. Implementation positions at Micros pay poorly, so poorly they are able to only attract low-paid people from the restaurant industry, former servers and cooks. The result is a revolving door policy and no one lasting more than eighteen months in the position. Anyone who excels at this role either quickly leaves for a better opportunity or gets promoted to another position in the office. They are so distrustful of their own new hires that they make them take drug tests as a condition of employment and wait more than 90 days before they receive benefits. The culture in the Boston office could only be explained as being child-like. It was like being in high school all over again. The employees had formed cliques and management had their favorite employees that could do no wrong. Instead of helping to mentor new employees, senior employees would purposefully withhold help and needed information just to see how you'd do on your own. In fact, they had this bizarre ritual where they would pull the experienced person from a go-live at the last minute, leaving the new employee on their own in a highly stressful situation, again just to see how they would react. Of course, chaos would generally ensue, causing problems for the client, but management didn't seem to care. There's a feeling that new employees have to "pay their dues" like those that came before them. I've never encountered that before in what was supposed to be a professional environment, perhaps it's a carryover from the restaurant industry that these people came from. Work-life balance is non-existent at Micros. You're expected to be available nights, weekends, and holidays at a client's whim in addition to the Monday through Friday office hours. And you're expected to put in all this extra time with no additional compensation. And if that isn't bad enough, you have to take turns with other members of the implementation group covering support calls on nights and weekends. For a full week of after-hours and weekend coverage, you get extra pay, a whopping $100. It's like a slap in the face. And, by the way, should you have a death in your immediate family, be prepared to provide "proof of death" if you want to use bereavement leave. It's simply incredible that a company distrusts it's employees to that point. Be aware that the entire company, and some locations more than others, are micromanaged by OCD executives that critique your attire, the organization of your work area, the time you arrive for work, the amount of time you take for lunch, and the amount of time you spend away from your desk. You won't even be given a cubicle to work in, you're placed in a large open area that they call "the pit" so they can keep tabs on what you're doing constantly.