HealthMEDX reviews

Total lack of focus, vision, and planning. Product is buggy and largely held together with duct tape after years of neglect. Leadership spends its time reacting to emergencies because a customer is always angry about something. The culture is not very good - the new "hello" at HMX has become "know anyone who is hiring?". Company tried to go Agile last year, but the thought of teams making their own decisions scared the pants off of the leadership so we're back to Lead-By-Spreadsheet. For a lot of senior people here, HealthMEDX is their first and only job, so they have no exposure to a management style that isn't top-down, passive-aggressive micromanagement (passive in that they don't have enough time to oversee your every task, aggressive in that this is your fault).

Old, fragile code base means that the software is buggy and constantly having emergency problems. Fixing simple bugs often take way longer than they should, because the code is so poorly written that it’s hard to isolate the issue. There is no focus on cleaning up this technical debt. The only goal is to add new features haphazardly based on client demand, rather than on what’s actually good for the product. No new technologies are used, so employee skills are not grown. Not that most of the employees care. Many of them are content to just come in and work their 8-5 and never learn anything new. Management also doesn't have a focus on growing employees to make those resources more valuable. Instead, poor technology decisions are made because “it would be too hard for the current employees to deal with a change to something new.” There is no training at all. There continues to be talks about developing a real training program and actually getting useful documentation about how the product works, but it has yet to make any real progress. This only perpetuates the bad and fragile code base problems as employees don’t even understand the code they’re modifying before they’re changing how it works. This leads to a fix for one issue breaking three other items. This constant state of emergencies means the company is completely reactionary. There is never time for any strategic planning about what to do next. And if anyone tries to make a plan, it is immediately thrown out when the next thing blows up. Thus, employees constantly deal with new processes and procedures that get half implemented and then mostly discarded. Likewise, new features end up in the same state. A feature will be started, get half done, and then something else will come up and the feature will be left to rot incomplete. Often these half finished features still get pushed out to the customers and are then expected to work perfectly. The company tries to call itself Agile, but has fallen back into a completely Top-Down Waterfall approach. The company spent tons of money on an outside consulting team to come in and do Agile training. Within half a year of that training ending the company has completely forgotten everything it learned. During the brief period of Agile where teams were actually able to make a few decisions for themselves the company had its most stable and valuable releases. To this regard, only C-Suite and VPs are able to make any meaningful decisions in the company now. An employee’s direct manager is useless and completely a figurehead. This could possibly be acceptable if anyone at or above the VP level had a clue about what we actually do here. The CEO said to the entire organization that “We’re a services company with a product.” She apparently has no idea that we’re a software development company and that without working software we have absolutely no way to make any money. Aside from this incompetence, management will constantly make promises that they either can’t or have no intention of keeping. Dozens of employees have been promised working environments, particular projects, promotions, or salary changes and either have them continually pushed back and put on hold or finally flat out denied. These false promises start in the interview process, where the company tries to lure in anyone with a pulse, regardless of that potential employee’s desires or competencies. This extends to our customers as well. Contracts are constantly made with clients for features that haven’t even been started on and, years later, are often still not delivered. These special features are left until the last minute and then all other work is dropped to try and satisfy these commitments on time. Employee resources are treated like commodities and are paid as little as possible, instead of what they’re actually worth. Salary increases only come when you threaten to quit, rather than for any demonstrated abilities.