Eze Software reviews

You're about to graduate from a top college. Among the most intriguing companies that you see as part of your job search is a financial technologies company that puts you through a "Leadership Development Program" as training for a Business Consultant role in a little over a year. After a long interview process, you're hired. You go in expecting to run financial models, run "regression" on data, and learn how to work with brokers, traders, and portfolio managers. And then you arrive for your first day. You quickly realize that your expectations are nothing more than an illusion, carefully crafted by Eze's HR team and management. Eze, as much as it likes to behave like one, is not a "finance" company; it's a software company that serves financial institutions. All of the work that you will be doing in the QA division is going to revolve around testing software. What is software testing? Good question. The "regression" that I mentioned earlier involves looking at 200+ page Word documents with pictures that look something like this: 1. Click the icon on the top left side of the window. Make sure that a new window opens. 2. In the new window, start clicking around quickly near the bottom and ensure that the window doesn't crash. Be sure to do this for a few minutes. Managers will tell you that regression is training. That's true, but consider that you may spend up to six months going through hundreds of steps like the two above for ten hours per day, five days a week. It is a mind-numbing task that doesn't use a single one of the skills that were tested in your interview, much less your college education. Next, you will be ready to work on verifications. Verifications are, put simply, mini versions of the regression scripts that you have been running. They target a single software defect and require you to "test around" an issue. This involves clicking random buttons that could somehow be tangentially related to the issue described to ensure that the "bug" is no longer present. The remainder of your time in QA will be spent writing regression scripts, writing testing plans, and testing ad hoc issues that have been fixed for clients in the field. None of the work that you will be doing requires any financial acumen or leadership skills. You are being trained in a highly specialized piece of software with few transferrable skills; you are going to need to do some serious work on your resume if you want to move elsewhere in the financial services industry. If I haven't convinced you to look elsewhere based solely on the unchallenging nature of the work, I hope that my description of management will sway you. The managers in the QA division are extremely passive aggressive. They realize that they are middle managers with few opportunities for advancement because of their laziness and ineptitude. This has made them deeply bitter, which poisons the workplace. Walk behind the managers at any given part of the day and you are likely to see them looking at ESPN or doing anything but working. Eze likes to hire people from top schools, and this drives the managers insane because they realize that their employees are likely to be successful and move through the company while they stay put. Because they're the gateway to the rest of the company, they slow down everybody's progress to prevent them from leaving the division. Here are some examples of the quality of these individuals. One manager was drunk one night and told some of the girls in the division - to their faces - that he had only hired them because they "were hot." Another manager schedules surprise "Sync Ups" with employees where, behind closed doors, he berates them. Nobody is immune to his sync ups. People often leave the building immediately after these meetings because they cannot handle remaining inside. The managers also randomly fire somebody every few months to restore the fear that characterizes life in the QA division. Everyone in the Leadership Development Program is working towards a goal - becoming a Business Consultant. Best put, consulting has nothing to do with business or finance advice: it's on-site tech support. The phone rings incessantly all day and you provide phone support. If the problem is big enough, you travel across the city to the client's office. You are also responsible for implementations, or going to a client's office from 7pm until 2 or 3 am, or whenever the software has finished installing on a client's machine. You don't really need a college education for that job either. The longer you spend at Eze, the more specialized you become, and the more trapped you are. By the way, management likes me and has promoted me several times. They have no idea that I feel like I do, nor do they acknowledge that a large portion of the QA division feels similarly.