Concur cares about you. They think. As long as you are exactly the same as everyone else at Concur. As long as you don't complain about anything that happens to you at Concur. As long as you keep your head down. As long as you don't ask for any assistance from outside your team. As long as you don't complain when your assignments are literally impossible without assistance that you can't get. (As long as you can prove that you were working very hard and producing a product, it doesn't matter that it does not and cannot work.)
Concur seems to have a management training program which turns out people who exult in trying to make every employee like every other employee. Two employees have different strengths? NOT ON MY WATCH. We will not assign people to tasks that they excel at. And if we accidentally do, then we will make sure that, if your task is not high status, you will not get any promotions or significant pay increases, no matter how important that job is.
Nothing gets done at Concur unless you know someone. Filing a ticket because you need a static IP address at your desk, so you can do tests? It won't be denied, it will simply languish for six months, until you contact this guy you know who tells you who would know who to talk to, and three hours later you've tracked down someone to take care of your problem, and an hour after that it's done. Woe betide the remote employee who doesn't start out with an automatic support network of the people in the offices near him.
HR/benefits is never your friend. Example: you read the rules of how the 401k matching works (updated for this year!) on the company's benefits web site, and schedule your 401k contributions accordingly. Except the matches don't come in properly. So you file an HR ticket, which gets ignored. So you go and find the appropriate person via networking (see above) and say 'look this isn't working how your document says it should'. And they say 'wait where did you get that document' and you say '...the benefits web site?' And two hours later they write you an email saying 'thank you for pointing out that document, it was wrong and we have removed it and the right document is elsewhere and it says that you're going to lose out on several thousand dollars this year and that is not our problem.' And if you want your money, that you were entitled to according to their own document, you will have to sue them, because not giving you the money you were entitled to is a hill that they will die on.
HR/benefits makes a LOT of mistakes. For example, issuing incorrect W2s, and then having to correct them, and issuing incorrect CORRECTIONS, and having to correct THOSE. And then next year issuing incorrect W2s AGAIN.
Like 'accidentally' taking double the legal amount for HSAs out of your paycheck, and then telling you that they couldn't correct it themselves, and that you would have to do so (even though the HSA contractor they use says that it's their responsibility to correct it). And then in order to correct it making you sign a document that says 'the undersigned has been advised to discuss this with a CPA or a tax law expert' and then refusing to pay for you to discuss this with a CPA or a tax law expert. Even though they are the ones who created the problem in the first place.
Like giving people the wrong cell phone reimbursement policy, and then after they've put in their expenses for the first two months, telling them that that was not the right policy and that it was their responsibility to know what the right policy was.
Like their parent company (SAP) having an on-call-time pay policy, and Concur accidentally allowing on-call-time reimbursement for one person, but when the other people who are on call and want to be paid for it too ask for it, Concur discovering their 'error' and lecturing them on how all developers should be DevOps and should expect to be on call 24/7 as part of their job description. This despite mediocre pay and benefits, no stock options, and crappy bonuses. "Look, if you have to work from 5 AM until 7 PM on January 1st, hung over, and you miss a party you were looking forward to for weeks, that is not our problem. Maybe you can ask your manager for a day off. But not two days off. That would be crazy."
The most astonishing thing about working at Concur is that there are still some good people there. I can't imagine how, though.
