Review of tracelink's culture - Functional Applications Developer TraceLink Employee Review

1.0
Aug 25, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Work-life balance - Free lunch

Cons

- The code-base is the *worst* code-base I've seen in my 15 years of work in the industry - The people overseeing engineering don't have a clue on how to fix it. Their solution - use Java instead of Scala. Java doesn't write itself! You need good engineers for that. - To give an idea of just horrible the code-base is, simple HTML and CSS changes require modifying anonymous functions in Scala! - The people who have made the mess have been promoted and quite honestly it shows that they have had no experience building web apps. - Engineering management is a disaster. I had interns who were running amok, slinging huge amounts of business critical code with no oversight. Their code was *extremely* poorly formatted, with no test coverage and no one had a clue as to how it happened. Everyone is sitting there looking at each other, clueless!! - Rollouts are a nightmare. Stuff breaks *all* the time. Everything falls on one guy, and it's kinda strange why that happens. It could be individual effort, it could also be wanting to own black-boxes, type of big company culture.

Explore other reviews about TraceLink

5.0
Dec 19, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

CEO is visionary Positive work environment

Cons

Very slow growth or no growth

2.0
Apr 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

* Free lunch in the office. * Good tech solving real problems and improving the safety of the pharma supply chain. * Smart contributor and manager-level employees.

Cons

* CEO and COO don't trust the people they hire and micromanage often. When something fails, you get blamed despite an executive taking a major role in shifting it from your vision to the current state. * Penny pinching and outsourcing constantly without considering the downstream consequences. Example: Cutting an experienced contractor to use a cheap foreign freelancer from an online marketplace, resulting in deliverable delays that affect board presentations. * General poor treatment of talent. Horror stories like pressuring people to finish work over the holidays for SKO, when in reality they were being laid off. Layoffs happen annually. An incredible amount of hiring from the outside instead of promoting within too. * Terrible RTO push. Went from attributing growth during COVID to how good we were at WFH to completely eliminating remote work opportunities and mandating 5 days in office.

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