Uptake reviews

- In order to impress management as an engineer you will have to work 60-80 hour weeks (you are simply a piece of meat to them). - You will frequently be reminded that management wants you to speak up if you think something is wrong.... but then they will not listen or are too busy to even meet with you. - You will do repetitive work to meet S.O.W. (statement of work) commitments. - Depending on which team you land on you will either be under or over worked (there is no happy medium). - You will never get direct feedback about a feature from a customer. - You frequently have to interface with consulting teams that often produce less than quality work.

Uptake sounds like a dream job: casual environment, challenging problems to solve, and cutting edge technologies to work with. But it's really a facade: it's just a place that money has been poured into to hire human capital, jack up the valuation, and then either sell or go public so the investors can cash out. You will find dozens of people who have know idea what their job is or how they integrate into the cohesive whole of the company. At first, I thought I was missing something. But after a year I'm forced to conclude there is no cohesive whole: it is just a scheme. I'm glad I've found other employment before this place changes hands and creates a glut in the supply of software engineers on the market in Chicago. The worst part about it is the cronyism and incompetence that haunts the ranks of middle and upper management. There really are great, talented engineers who work here who have been buried by the rituals of panic-driven development. There is no work-life balance here: you will be expected to perform a high amount of repetitive work to satisfy client SOWs. There is no real vision, just getting by from one SOW to another. They also only have one actual client, which makes them highly dictatorial. In short: there is no real product at Uptake. The product is you. You're hired to increase the valuation so it can be sold at a higher price. And they certainly treat you like a piece of flesh.