Everything I am about to say is not based on my judgement of the company. It is based on my reflection of how I acted when I was there, how I was treated, and even how I treated others. After years of working somewhere else, I'm still awoken in the middle of the night with the occasional SilverTech nightmare. I often think about the amount of time in my life I wasted working for a company that was only concerned with squeezing every ounce of energy and resources out of their employees, while blatantly ignoring the fact that everyone was slowly being crushed by the weight of their job. The best way I can describe SilverTech is similar to an abusive relationship or a cult. They are manipulative, and narcissistic. You wouldn't think that a company could be considered those things, but SilverTech makes it possible. You don't even know what's happening to you until you're fully engrained. Working at SilverTech is like drinking the kool aid. When you finally break out of that and see it for what it truly is, it's haunting. I know you're probably reading this and thinking, well they haven't really explained anything concrete yet. This is because SilverTech is an expert at "Death by a thousand paper cuts". The company sells itself well, using their culture and seemingly fun environment to entice candidates. There were many fun moments and good memories, I enjoyed most of my coworkers, but the job itself was utterly soul sucking. It only takes a couple of times getting burned by something at SilverTech until you start to figure out how to survive there. Every point of communication regarding commitments or responsibilities is usually done via email or chat, so that there is written proof of every situation. "Cover your a**" is a learned behavior at SilverTech. The acronym "CYA" is used by management to encourage employees to behave this way. When I say getting burned, what I mean is, something on a project has gone wrong, and you don't have the written evidence to prove that it wasn't your fault. But somebody else likely has enough written evidence to prove that is your fault, or seems that way. Leading you to get dragged into a conference room with big glass windows so everyone can watch you be publicly yet silently shamed for your screw up. The company has a bad habit of mismanaging projects which leads their teams into this cyclical effect. Sales struggles to sell Projects are undersold, misunderstood, overpromised Engineers and Managers give pushback as they are set up to fail Sales gets a slap on the wrist with no real consequences Processes are put in place to attempt to mitigate these issues which somehow still constantly fail to fulfill their purpose. This causes budgets and timelines to run over. Each project that misses, causes the next project to miss. The only people who are expected to fix said issues, are the people who are doing the actual work, building the actual products that have been sold and promised. Dates and products have been promised to clients so how can we not deliver them? Even if it's physically impossible? So by the time any new project starts, there is already tension, contention, and stress on every team member's plate. This leads to a lot of finger pointing, long extra, uncompensated hours, and unnecessary stress. I was pushed to work harder, do better, and be smarter. I was good at what I did and was able to thrive for a while before the physical conditions wore down my health (physical, emotional, and mental). During this short period of time thriving, I was encouraged by my boss and even the CEO to push my peers and my juniors just as hard if not harder. "They aren't working hard enough, they should be working harder." "You should delegate more to them so that you can take on more." "Well lets fire them if they aren't willing to work harder" Also don't forget the expectations of being available by phone and email 24/7. Work doesn't end when you leave the building, not when you sell your soul to the SilverTech devil. We're not ending world hunger, we're not fixing the homeless crisis, housing crisis or ending the opioid epidemic. We're making commercial banking websites. Yet every project is treated like it's going to save the world, and all this extra hard work you do is going to make you a hero. You get a nice pat on the back and maybe a shoutout at a company meeting. Yippee. Everyone who works there will say they "work hard, play hard". In some sick way of coping with the unrealistic working conditions they're (for some reason) voluntarily enduring. "Working hard" consists of working 10-14 hour days. Playing hard consists of drinking while you work late, often with alcohol provided by management, having a hosted outing where drinking is free, having a summer event where drinking is free, having a weekly Thursday event where drinking is free, or going to a giant Christmas party, where, you guessed it, drinking is free! At SilverTech stress is dealt with by drinking and encouraging drinking. Ask how many employees have a bottle of liquor in their desk drawer and the results would astound you. SilverTech is also notorious for underpaying their talent. You might think I am saying this out of spite, but I'm not. I was actually content with my compensation although I had to very aggressively advocate for myself. But when people started talking about salaries and how much money they made it was often very sad to hear how little they were paying some people. One way that they are able to achieve this is by running an intern program with local colleges. They sponsor students from local colleges completing their senior projects and sell this really fun awesome image of a company. The students show up for one day a week, usually a Friday, the day where more of the fun activities are planned, and think this place is pretty cool. They have a small project with no real deadlines, aren't client facing, and their only responsibilities are to themselves and their degree. Usually after every internship season multiple job offers are made at below the bottom of the barrel price points, and young excited professionals don't know any better to look for competing offers. On top of the long hours, high stress environment, disrespect and demoralizing behaviors: there are fantastic benefits. The insurance premiums go up every year, and the plans get less inclusive. If you or someone in your family actually needs medical attention, you may as well pretend like you don't have health insurance, I think it might be cheaper. You get the bare minimum PTO, of which you are never encouraged to take, and when you do you are treated like you've put an ungodly burden on the company. To be fair with the hours they expect everyone to work, taking a day off is really like taking two days off. But hey, you get your birthday off and there are really cool retro arcade games. SilverTech is so cool!
