* Ethically bankrupt -- Make no mistake this company does whatever it takes to make a buck. That includes questionable business practices in contract submittals, firing employees the CEO thinks might question those practices, baiting potential hires with flasely high salaries, lying to customers, pretending to have talent they do not, you get the idea....
* Technical pretenders - While some employees are good quality highly skilled engineers and technicians, the company is only worried about how things appear on the contract. Really just another company worried about getting a resume list for the contract bid, but never worrying about actually applying those talents or even if they actually have the employee represented in the resume submitted. This is a company that sold itself to the government as a cybersecurity firm that could conduct red team testing yet had exactly zero (0) qualified red team testers. They sold themselves as a DEVOPS shop yet had no true DEVOPS engineers on staff. They sell themselves as experts in cloud computing yet had few cloud computing experts. They sell themselves as an AGILE and DEVOPS software shop yet do not hold CMMI certs. The list procedes nicely... In short this is a typical government contracting "body shop."
* Clock watchers -- The CEO likes to clock watch. While they profess that they only want the work done the facts differ significantly. There is ABSOLUTELY no flex time allowed. If they say that there is get it on paper and signed. Office hours are 8:00am - 4:30pm , no ifs ands or buts allowed, (its in the employee handbook); be ready to be in the middle of rush hour every day. The CEO tries to micro-manage every employee and if he even thinks you have not been in the office the correct times he will fire you.
* No Warning Firings - The CEO basically likes to come in and fire people, seemingly at random, but there is a common thread here -- they never provide a reason at the time of termination. Employees are left guessing as to what exactly went wrong. No prior notification or attempt to correct whatever the percieve deficiency was, just FIRE 'EM! In a period of less than a year I saw about 10 firings (that's 10% of workforce) like this.
* High Turnover - combine the CEOs propensity for ad hoc firings with the general paranoia he creates and you get a turnover well above 20% per year. Very, very few people stay beyond one year.
- Substandard time off - combined with the inflexibility of work hours and work locations and well -- don't get sick or have a family emergency. Its two weeks PTO a year including sick time. And don't complain about it; after one of the touchy feely "Townhall Thursdays" where an employee asked about time off, he was fired within two weeks because management thought he posted a critical Glassdoor review mentioning PTO, well at least that's what we assumed since the CEO provided no concrete reason to the employee.
* Bad HR practices - From an employee handbook that violates the law (Do not disclose your pay rate), to the firing only disciplinary methods, to the terminations for raising questions about employee benefits, and lying to job seekers this is an ethically if not professionally bent HR department.
* Know-it-all CEO - The CEO is the COO with about 25 people reporting directly to him. He thinks he knows all factors of all disciplines; sorry, he was an econ major and has very little engineering accumen. He will try and impose his often incorrect view onto all things. He will not listen to reason or technically knowledgeable professionals if he believes something is so.
