Ineffectual, struggling company pretending to be a funky start-up - Information Technology Kurtosys Employee Review

1.0
11 Jan 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Central London location (but horrible building)

Cons

Creaking IT infrastructure (senior staff blog & give dishonest presentations to the community about using various ‘cloud’ & ‘devops’ technologies, when in fact many customers are suffering on ancient legacy platforms with no migration plan). Disorganised & confused leadership, managers have their favourites and everyone else is left to rot (particularly those outside the US). Over-reliance on a small number of customers - losing just one resulted in immediate & significant redundancies. More-and-more offshoring to low-quality cheap labour. No matter how much they try to talk-up the technology, their product is still just a basic reporting/document management portal. I look forward to a response with a typical empty platitude such as "we've made mistakes, but we've changed, and we continue to learn, etc" but unfortunately I repeatedly heard the exact same thing when I was an employee. Their social media 'management' and profile is unrepresentative of the actual company culture; to prospective employees I'd say look elsewhere, there's no shortage of genuine 'tech' companies, all of whom are doing bigger and better things than this failing outfit.

avatar
Kurtosys Response
10y
Thank you for your feedback. We embrace constructive feedback and try to make changes where we can. If you feel comfortable, please feel free to reach out to me directly. Our offices in London are centrally located in Covent Garden, and you are probably correct to point out that the building isn’t as great as some of the surrounding buildings. It is our goal to find great space in a great location, much like we have done in New York and South Africa. We were founded in 2002, have made dramatic changes since then, and sweeping changes since 2012. Over the past few years, we have introduced several new products and moved from deployed solutions as well as single instance/single tenant solutions to a multi-tenant cloud based environment. Of course the dramatic change can be a frustrating experience, as it was for you. We are committed to continuous improvement. There have certainly been bumps in the road, and as an employee who deeply cares about our customers, it must’ve been a challenging year to work through these issues. Now, the company is in a much better place, operating with a stable environment and working to constantly improve. Our global infrastructure and engineering teams are committed to that. Over this year, we are managing both our incident rate and our availability with significant improvements in both measures. Our ability to manage change at the pace we needed to endure is greatly enhanced by the technology changes we have made. Over the past year, we have significantly invested in our people. We have invested in training, conferences, and built out a new talent acquisition department with the aim of hiring the best and brightest globally. Over the next year, a large part of our hiring will be in Cape Town, where the population is highly educated and incredibly talented, just like each of our locations. Last year, we focused much of our recruitment efforts on building our Reno and India offices to provide global customer service. That said, we have a tremendous team in London, which I have seen accomplish amazing things. Our engineering, infrastructure and project management teams are amazing, and I couldn’t be more proud of everything they have done. We will always have a core nucleus of talented employees located in London. From a product perspective, we have a robust suite of products ranging from Fact Sheets, Client Reporting tools and Portals, to Websites and Fund Tools. These are built on a technology that really enables us to differentiate ourselves. We constantly evaluate ways to improve and enhance our technology platform. For those interested in working within the FinTech space and using technologies enabled by REST APIs, JavaScript and NodeJS as well as scalable distributed systems to name but a few, Kurtosys is be an attractive place to work. I am truly sorry that your experience at Kurtosys was unpleasant. It is really difficult working in an environment that is focused on constant evolution. I hope you found a role that makes you happy. Scott Gellman

Explore other reviews about Kurtosys

5.0
30 Jan 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazing work environment, great people, great benefits

Cons

nothing honestly it is a great company.

1
5.0
19 Aug 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Our office strikes the perfect balance of fun and focus – my colleagues are fantastic and I love coming to work every day. Kurtosys gives me the opportunity to learn and make an impact on our business operations and growth - I’ve learned more in my time at Kurtosys than I have ever before in my career. Management encourages employees to think outside of the box, develop new/better processes, and to continually improve. They trust employees and are transparent about financial results and company priorities. Plus, employee contributions are rewarded: management regularly gives accolades to hard-working employees. Summary list of pros: great office location, regular team events/happy hours, responsive IT team, smart colleagues, managers that want to mentor and develop employees, and an improving HR and performance review process. Plus, we’re growing quickly, which creates more and more opportunity for everyone.

Cons

It would be great to get more PTO for the US office (3 weeks is the US standard, less than global offices), though the 10 holidays are nice. Other than that, I have no complaints and consider this my best workplace/career move to date. All of the expectations set during my interview process have been met and I have not been disappointed or let-down by the company in any way.

4
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All