Pros
What you're about to read below is a pretty significant negative review of Synectics Solutions. I feel the need to at very least explain that my entire experience employed here was not negative. If you work here you will hopefully very quickly find that your fellow employees are great to work with, As a developer I formed friendships with other developers, manual testers and automated testers, the individual people can be fantastic, and the chance to speak with them, to hang out with them and to continue my friendships with them outside of work has been wonderful. I feel like I have left Synectics knowing a significant network of professionals and I am very grateful for the chance to know them.
Cons
Working as a Software Developer at Synectics Solutions is a pretty harrowing affair. In the beginning you may likely be caught up in the excitement of the relatively interesting products that they produce, but pretty soon the rose-tinted glasses disappear and you can fully understand the mountain of mismanagement, technical debt and ridiculously impossible time pressures. All of that is before you even notice that there is an underlying culture of nepotism leading decisions on who gets what role, what pay increase, or what recognition. To start with what I believe was the most fundamental issue during my time employed there, the mismanagement and confusion around projects. Poor decision making and lack of trust in your employees ultimately led to project cancellations, rewrites, and then incredible pressures on developers to try and pull something together against the clock, even when all of their quotes tell you it is impossible. That leads me into the area of mistrust, myself and my colleagues collectively had years and years of experience in a very specific niche, and yet our thoughts and opinions meant nothing when it came to deciding what technologies should be used, what reasonable time frames could be expected, and what the limitations there were.Instead all the decisions are made by a technologically clueless product team, and a couple of homestay engineering managers who haven’t seen the world or tech outside of Synectics any time in the last 20 years.I wouldn’t want to make any personal comments, purely based on work-related and internal decision making I can easily say the people in charge have lost touched with software development after being forced to support an ancient piece of technology for so long. Beware, if you are to join Synectics in nearly any role, you are going to have to support, sell or develop an out-of-date nightmare. Sure, the actual functionality of the core product is actually very useful, but look behind the facade and you’ll see over 15 years of string and tape keeping the whole thing together. Do you trust and allow your developers to rebuild things to make it easier to support? No. Let’s just keep adding tape because particularly large clients want something outside the scope of the system. While reading this, you may be asking yourself, ‘Well this all sounds pretty terrible, you must be well compensated at the very least right?’ Hah, sigh. There are many many reasons so many of the developers at Synectics have quit in the last year, but pay is surely one of the most significant ones. The pay is awful. If you are a current employee reading this, know that the new employees are being paid more than you, know that all the leavers are being offered more money in desperation because they’ve realised how easy it is for us to go find reasonable money elsewhere. What they’re offering is not and will never be enough. If you’re at all involved in the engineering department at Synectics, you can easily go get paid 50-100% more elsewhere, as well as actually find yourself in a company that values your input.
