Stay Away from RSI - Programme Analyst Sparq Employee Review

First off, I believe it must be said that some of the reviews here and very clearly posted by company HR and executive personnel. The conditions you experience while working at RSI are no skin off their bones as they sit in Atlanta earning the big pay checks. Atlanta is clearly where all the money goes within this company as the pay here is atrocious. The argument the company has for the levels of pay they offer is that the development centers are in low cost of living areas. They claim they are competitive when in reality, the pay is laughably low even by local standards. A personal friend of mine, both of us recent graduates with the same degree, made 12k more than me at a company right down the road. Even more proof that this company is downright lying about competitiveness is that after leaving the development center in Mobile, I moved to Birmingham to work for a different company and enjoyed a similar cost of living but with an extra 20k in salary along with a 15% bonus and better insurance starting in an entry level position. RSI will only ever offer you a 3% bonus and sub par insurance so there's no helping their low pay. I guess they at least give you a bonus, right? Next is the company's LIMS upgrade project. This is another laughable aspect of this company as this project has almost nothing to do with real software development. The only programming you may do while on this project involves copying and pasting very basic snippets of code and modifying a variable or two. The rest of the work is reading spreadsheets and data entry. There's almost no thinking or problem solving involved here because most of this is done in Augusta while you're simply expected to copy and paste what they do. Even worse is the fact that the work you're having to copy and paste is very simplistic and basic consisting of only a few if/else statements. It's literally the type of programming you would do in a high school programming class, yet several members of the team thought it made them über programmers. The morale of the LIMS team is typically very low because everyone is treated as a leg worker performing data entry while employees on real development projects makes jokes about LIMS and the employees placed on the project. This was evident in the fact that we were treated like we knew nothing when talking with members of some of these other projects. It's understandable when looking at the type of work one would perform while on the LIMS project and the fact that it was commonplace to be working with someone with almost no programming or development experience. There were only a few of us that actually knew what real programming was and this caused contention at times. The rest were literally learning as they went. Further proof of this is the fact that the managers often joked in interviews that they would teach you everything you needed to know and that almost no programming questions would be asked while in these interviews. I say all this of this project because even if you don't interview for the LIMS project, you may still be placed on it. This brings me to another trait of this company. They move people around projects seemingly at random. The administrative reason they do this is because they often times need numbers to boost their attractiveness to outside clients. RSI will try to achieve this no matter the cost. This typically results in employees being placed on projects requiring skill sets they know nothing about or being vastly over skilled for the work they'll be doing. It's all a ruse to impress clients into working with RSI and is another example of the blatant dishonesty of this company. RSI will flat out lie to clients when detailing the capabilities of it's employees just so they can get an extra sale. This would often times result in projects being built up with new employees being hired in just for it to be cancelled a month later after the client backs out. This company is building a reputation and before too long, it's bubble is going to burst. It's common knowledge that RSI is a very shady company at the local universities in Mobile.