Heliolytics Reviews

All developers, no matter their work or experience or responsibilities, report to one person, the C.T.O. He is controlling and only knows a micro-management style tactic to get work done. His inexperience as a manager and unwillingness to develop leadership skills results in a toxic work environment. There are lots of examples of why I do not recommend working at Heliolytics as a developer. There is an abysmal level of technical debt that results in the development team spending most of their time making emergency fixes to existing code bases, or attempting to force old functionality to work for new out-of-scope deliverables. If not this, then developers are working on hacking together a prototype for the latest half-baked idea from the C.T.O. There is no time spent on generating documentation, or refactoring for code readability, clarity, maintenance, etc. and each new development 'hack' just adds to the debt. Critical production code is run on Jupyter notebooks, and a lack of standardization of version control results in problematic team collaboration. The C.T.O. has a severe lack of understanding of pipeline development, product management, time/resource management, so there are no sprints/milestones, no workflow methodology, etc. There is no bug testing and no unit testing, a general lack of best practices for software development. There are senior developers in the department who push for these processes, but ultimately get shut down. In fact, senior developers will plan for project progression by coming up with ways to make the C.T.O. think their ideas are his so as to unblock projects. Career trajectory for developers is murky and most if not all are stagnant in their roles. The C.T.O. assigns people to projects depending on how he wants people to interact (or to not interact) in order to maintain control over every project. This leads to a lot of talent and time being completely wasted. Across the whole company, there is a general lack of career growth opportunity and terrible company morale. For developers, there is inconsistent or non-existent performance reviews, making it very difficult to advance. The C.T.O. also has poor communication skills, resulting in unwarranted passive aggressive to aggressive feedback. There are also no K.P.I.s or metrics for performance, so it is unclear how things like 'discretionary' bonuses are calculated. As you can imagine, with a completely flat team structure, there is no paths for advancement or promotion. I was grossly under-compensated for the work I performed. Pay is very low across all teams, but there is also evidence that it is even lower for women. Overtime is not tracked and it was frequently expected that developers would be dragged into all-night coding sessions to meet deadlines, sometimes multiple nights in a row. There are a lot of signs of immature company management, leading to burnout. The benefits package is also the lowest I have ever been offered, and it is widely discussed by employees how awful it is to need to choose between certain health procedures in a given year. As for the leadership team as a whole, including HR, there is zero accountability. A lot of missed deadlines and penalties would result in tough questions but no change. A lot of feedback and complaints about company operations, workload, pay, culture, etc. have gone no where. Furthermore, numerous complaints about sexism, nepotism, battery incidents would get swept under the rug. Very inappropriate behaviour by the C.T.O. at social gatherings continued up until the time I left, and I don't doubt it is almost certainly continuing.

Management (both exec & Team specific) expects every employee to have the diverse and seasoned skill set of a project manager, while also openly acknowledging that this is an entry level position with presumed high turnover. As a data analyst you are both somehow micromanaged down to every minute of your day and also have little to no accountability for timelines and quality of work. Tasks above your role will be given to you with the incentive of looking good at your next annual review. You’re expected to be a self-starter willing to take on non-core tasks with little to no guidance, and success in this role (promotions, higher bonuses, raises) is about looking valuable rather than being valuable. Sloppy work is accepted (in some ways a pro, on a personal level if you’re just looking to coast on by), but at the hindrance of the team as a whole. Specifically within the Analysis Team there are concerns from analysts about the management team. Management has no previous people lead experience and as such often fail to react appropriately and in a timely manner to a variety of situations. Your mental well-being is less important than moving past a situation without any uncomfortable encounters. This can be especially difficult since the team is small, you build a relationship with your manager and then you can be left feeling unsupported when you need it most. This is probably the biggest negative regarding personnel, structure, and the organization as a whole: the CTO. Timelines and deadlines do not exist to them. The CTO is very into being the boss but not very into the actual management aspect of this kind of role. He has been continuously condescending towards employees and has failed to acknowledge his shortcomings in this role, even after they are brought to his attention. He has hoarded menial tasks (literally running a jupyter notebook) and made himself the linchpin and bottleneck of providing clients their reports. Processes in place for all employees (where to document things, how to hand tasks off, etc.) do not exist for the CTO and if you need him to do something due Friday, you’d better ask Wednesday and spoon feed all the information to him as though he cannot think critically. Because he is a part-owner of Heliolytics, questioning him is nearly impossible. From the perspective of an analyst, it seems as though the Business Development team will make any promise to any client. Project scheduling shuffles on a daily basis with “priority” work or “strategic clients” springing up regularly. It’s incredibly detrimental to team morale to be constantly shuffling. These things happen at any business in a consulting world, but it’s a worrying business model to constantly be in this state of flux. Multiple times, myself or coworkers have encountered racism, sexism, and other inappropriate office behaviour. From all levels of management there is an infuriating willingness to sweep things under the rug in an attempt to move past inappropriate remarks or actions. The weight of knowing there are problematic people that you have to work with is fully on you and your conscience, while hollow apologies are deemed enough in order to move on.