I guess this is the section where I’m going to choose to explain my experience at Redwood. Because let me tell you, if I had to do it over again, I would’ve just avoided altogether.
The management at Redwood are great sales reps. I can give them that, because they literally sweet talked me into taking a role there and promised me the most amazing time of my life. Instead the opposite happened. So, l will break my review of Redwood into different sub sections so that it is easier to consume:
THE OFFICE: Redwood is in a kind of annoying part of town. Not quite close enough to the blue line, never enough parking spaces and lots of traffic. There’s almost nowhere to eat except some local fast food diner around the corner. Be prepared to drive, or walk for 15-20 mins before you arrive to your lunch.
Parking in the morning is brutal if you start after 8AM. I’ve lived in Chicago for over 2 decades, so when I say parking is brutal, parking is brutal.
From a male’s perspective, the bathroom at Redwood is a nightmare. I mean, there’s 3 stalls for 400 super frat bros who have been chugging redbulls and coffees all morning. It’s disgusting and some days you can’t even get in with how crowded it gets.
All of this could be forgiven if they didn’t spend thousands of dollars a month on the most absolute piece of garbage coffee maker, that works 3 days out of the month, and basically just spits out sewer at you.
THE CULTURE: People there are friendly. I could tell that, before I started, people used to be a lot closer together and enjoy each others company. Now people are a combination of either being completely on edge, Xanaxed out of their mind, or super anxious. I can count at least 3 separate occasions where someone completely (and unprofessionally) screamed at either me or another coworker for something completely immaterial. I can also count 2 occasions in which I was offered Adderall in the office so that I could get more work completed. Seriously, if Redwood actually drug tested their employees, half of their staff would be gone.
With the comments that mention that HR is constantly trying to coerce employees into writing good reviews, they are not lying. They will hound you. Part of the reason I’m writing this because I saw that they were nominated for Fortunes best places to work with.
MANAGEMENT: There is a great deal of nepotism going on at Redwood. It became very apparent to me there that if I you were not part of the boys club, that you would soon find yourself out the door. I tried to take advantage of their “open door” policy, here’s a few examples of when Redwood literally made me cringe:
-After bringing up to management that the team needed to do a better job testing, I was told to think if I wanted to still be in this firm and to go home and “think” about it. This was at 11AM in the morning during a live implementation! These people are trying to play Mr. Holland's Opus here trying to teach lessons while their clients are literally giving them thousands of dollars.
-I once requested a personal day and was questioned if i should be taking time off. This is after working 14+ hour days.
-I was given some clients as part of their on-boarding program with the expectation that I would “fail” so that I would really learn for their tougher clients. And believe me, we failed. I wrote management a lengthy email expressing my concern for the well-being of the client projects that we were launching, and questioned whether we could be going things differently or not. That email went unanswered.
-During my very last one on one with my manager, in which I expressed concern about the disorganization of the firm and the lack of execution, training and processes I was told “stick around, we have some big changes coming.” I think I was let go about 2 weeks later with no reason whatsoever.
CLIENTS: I feel terrible for their clients. They are so nice and understanding. Working with them was probably the best part of working at Redwood. They are getting screwed.
There were instances in which we had to cut out promised features during a delivery because Redwood just simply had no idea how to satisfy the need. You can tell there is a disconnect between what the sales team thinks the delivery team can do, what management thinks the delivery team can do, and what the delivery team can actually do. And unfortunately, it is the clients that pay for this disconnect.
ARCHITECTURE: These people do not know the difference between Agile and Waterfall.
After reviewing their database structure and differences between their development instances, their test environments and their production environments I can confidently say that a first-year computer science student can spit out a better design model. The place is a mess and hardly indexed.
Without saying too much I can say that 95% of the time that we had to bring a client’s operational processes down, that it was due to Redwoods poor implementation.
PROFESSIONALISM: In my time there I witnessed a handful of times where I believed I was told to do something highly unethical. I will speak about the instances in which I was part of:
-After a very poor delivery where we could barely get the system to work, I was told to push for the delivery acceptance form so that we could turn on the service model part of the contract. The rates for that model would’ve been more than double then the regular implementation model.
-They have questionable uses of their third-party licenses. It’s kind of hard to explain, but in summary, let’s just say that it is possible that a very large client leaving Redwood could potentially impact operational processes for other completely unrelated clients.
-Redwood is obsessed with making sure all the minorities at least “know” each other. It's so awkward how they try and force all the POC to know each other because of certain similarities.
-The guys would all obsesses over the same girls, I felt so bad for those ladies.
