I worked for ATS for several years, in both divisions, in positions that gave me significant visibility into different functional areas/departments. While there are many smart and hard-working individuals at ATS, as a whole, the company is not a good place to work, and verges on toxic in my opinion. If you are reading through the glassdoor reviews and wondering if it really could be as bad as they say, all I can say is believe the hype. These reviews should be taken as genuine warnings, not sour grapes from people who've been laid off. There are good reasons the reviews are so pervasively negative.
First and most fundamental, ATS has frequent layoffs and tons of churn in employees. There were multiple mass layoff events just in the two years I was there. At the same time, out of the other side of their mouth management says we’re on plan and hitting our targets. The executives come across as consistently two-faced and uncaring about the effects their decisions have on people's lives and careers. Even employees who at any other company would be beyond safe were regularly targeted for layoffs, such as long-term, moderately-paid employees with tons of institutional knowledge, or people who had left 20 year careers at other companies or relocated across the country to come to ATS, and had been there less than 6 months. When I worked on the safety camera side of the business, literally every project I worked on involved outsourcing or layoffs in some form or another. There’s a culture of fear among most employees because of this. For this reason *alone* I can’t recommend ATS as an employer. It’s just not a safe place to pursue a long-term career.
ATS also suffers from a top heavy management structure, with way too many managers, and not nearly enough professional-class individual contributors to do the heavy lifting. There’s also a tendency to hire from the outside rather than promote from within, especially for management-class employees. So quite a few of the managers are people who have failed out of better companies, with ATS serving as a soft landing place (to be fair, there are some exceptions to this). Even mid-level managers are paid inflated salaries given the size of the company and the scope of their responsibilities, and there’s also a bonus structure that tends to incentivize the absolute worst kind of reactive, hair-on-fire management behaviors. As you might imagine, the leaders who manage to thrive in such an environment are just completely miserable, horrible people. There are way too many "leaders" at ATS who are gossipy, immature, cliquish and demeaning to the people who actually do the work. I seriously can’t overemphasize how dysfunctional management is here.
Project management discipline is sorely lacking as well. Rather than picking a few well-vetted business-critical priorities and pursuing them aggressively, the tendency is to over-commit to everything at once, regardless of whether the resources are available to actually deliver, or whether it’s an actual priority or not. It’s my belief this behavior is driven by the bonus structure tied to goals and controls. Being “customer-centric” is used as cover for a complete lack of anything approaching project planning discipline. The saying “if you try to do ten things, you’ll do them all poorly” applies in spades to ATS. I have never seen leadership that is less capable of prioritizing. No one takes No or Wait as an answer, and everyone has a grossly overblown sense of urgency. You will get zero support on your projects, and any progress you do make will be immediately punished with a list of a dozen more items. Half-finished projects are legion, and the workload ends up being an endless series of fire drills. It’s a completely demoralizing working environment, totally aside from the poisonous management culture and constant fear of layoffs.
Finally, these are more minor, but it should be said that the health plan is bad, and PTO is not an accrued benefit (so they don’t have to cash it out when they go through one of their quarter quells).
