Pros
- Co-workers are, for the most part, pretty good people who are fun to work with - Lower-level management is friendly and approachable - Good work / life balance, infrequent that you'd have to work more than the regular 40 hours / week - Extremely casual dress code
Cons
- Lack of effective communication - Substandard compensation and benefits - Poorly defined criteria for promotion or advancement - Free lunch every Tuesday and Thursday, free snacks around the office - Unlimited PTO You're probably asking yourself why I have listed unlimited PTO and "free food" as cons, and not as pros. Here's why: Both of these things are distractions. They are distractions from the sub-par pay, the minimal benefits, and the woefully inadequate upper management. Let me provide you with an example. SevOne has a panel of volunteer employees who are tasked with coming up with ideas on how to improve the company. The panel is supposed to meet monthly, which it doesn't, but that's besides the point. At one of the meetings, an employee was talking about how he found communication within the company to be lacking. The Founder / Chief of Staff interrupted him and completely dismissed what he was saying, without allowing him to finish his point. Does that sound like good management to you? Allow me to respond to some of the comments made in other reviews, and SevOne's responses: "We have an open door policy where you are more than welcome to set up a 1:1 with your manager or any other executive to discuss your opinions and concerns." -- Director of Operations This is false. The entirety of the executive team works out of the Boston office, with rare visits to the Newark office, and even rarer visits to the Philadelphia office. The majority of the employees work out of the Newark office. How are you supposed to walk through someone's "open door" when they work a few hundred miles away? You might be saying to yourself something like, "He's taking that too literally, obviously you're not supposed to walk into their offices, you're supposed to email or call". Nope, that doesn't work either. There were times when the entirety of the Newark engineering department had zero contact with any members of the executive team, for as long as a month at a time. I'm not exaggerating. "Half of the senior management acts like this is still a tiny company being run out of a garage. The other half treats the company like it's a 20,000-employee behemoth that can't be changed except at a glacial pace. Mid-senior management is a revolving door of people who spend about a year trying their best to solve problems and then leaving when they realize that they're never going to get anything productive done because the original leadership would rather listen to their favorite employees." -- Feb 24th review titled "Culture of Politics" This rings extremely true to me. It's a very apt description. "Sometimes things have to be found out through the grapevine" -- Feb 29th review titled "Great Place" Sometimes? That's a bit of an understatement, don't you think? If you're an engineer who's looking at this review in an attempt to decide whether or not you want to work for SevOne, and I haven't convinced you yet, let me provide you with one last anecdote. Before any code can be pushed to the master repository, it has to go through an automation process, which for the sake of the review I'll call "Process Q". Process Q is completely serial, meaning that only one of the 15ish teams can do it at a time. If some other team is Q'ing, then you get added to a queue. Oftentimes, this queue is 3 or 4 teams long. Now, here's where the real problem is: Process Q takes an average of 7-8 hours. So, it's an entirely normal occurrence for you to wait 24-32 hours before your code is pushed to the master repository. Oh, and QA can't test your code until the day after it makes it into the master repository. Good luck!
