Innovative Control Systems (PA) Reviews

When I first started, the place was a good place to work. The people were respectful, and while some of the humor was crass, it was at least acceptable. Throughout the years, the environment has become much more toxic, with finger pointing and backstabbing rampant. Working there for as long as I had, it became comfortable... until I realized I had been going into the office wondering WHEN, not IF, my day would be ruined by the passive aggressive management style and culture of negative feedback. It should be noted, that within the last 2 months I was there, multiple veteran employees with more than 8 years experience left the company. This should be a red flag in terms of the way they are losing talent. On top of that, over the past few years, the following highly concerning practices have seemingly been put in place to stay: - Feedback - it should be noted that the only feedback you will ever receive is when you've done something wrong. There is no thanks given for positive results, or working late to keep a client happy - Public shaming in weekly meetings in front of the entire department - Gross favoritism to certain individuals, to the point the rest of the staff were told we should all be giving our paychecks to said individual - Requirements are a 5 word item in a MS project task list (I refuse to call it a project plan, because there's no project management being done. All tasks are written down as 0.25 days to complete, regardless of the complexity involved) - Everything is a crisis, and we GOT TO fix the problem immediately - Promises are being made to clients, with target dates set without consulting the engineers who will be implementing the solution - Release schedules are seemingly done by throwing a dart at a calendar, and they GOT TO be done by that release - Any new technology or process introduced to streamline efficiencies and improve the code base is met with extreme opposition by management, and their favorites - QA is often bypassed, rushing releases out the door to meet unrealistic schedules and then management is SHOCKED when something goes wrong - Employees are treated as replaceable car wash employees, with the expectation they can be up and fully productive in minutes. This is regardless if you are an engineer, or a tier 1 support desk technician. - Management often talks over individuals and does not value input from employees, as they believe they know best - Emails are not read, and instead you are asked to reiterate your point that you have carefully laid out in the email, because it was simply too long to read

Development department morale is extremely low, with high recent turnover that included a long-time veteran lead engineer all privately citing management as their reason for leaving. Many current engineers are looking to exit for the same reasons: - The code base is enormous, disorganized, and largely undocumented. - Minimal training on how anything is supposed to work, less even than Support personnel. This leads to a lot of redundancies. - Best practices are largely ignored and at times fought against. Anti-patterns are the norm. - Generous score of 4 on the Joel test. - Micromanagement. - Unrealistic deadlines (Nearly every development task is assigned .25 days. It's a running joke). - Rushed and inconsistent production release schedule that often bypasses QA testing and sends untested code to production, for which the engineers are then blamed when inevitable problems emerge. - Management is easily offended by professional disagreement, even going so far as giving employees the silent treatment for things like casually mentioning to someone outside the department that QA didn't have enough time to test. - Department management plays clear favorites towards a single engineer, even going so far as to suggest in meetings on more than one occasion that other members of the department should give him part of their paychecks. - Processes are nearly non-existent. Much of the process that does exist is outdated. The few good processes in place had to be implemented in spite of, not because of, department management. - QA Release schedule is "We've GOT TO make a release today!" - Dishonesty during hiring process, for instance job advertised as "Flex Time" with remote as needed, but after hire this is clarified as "be in by 9:30 and work at least 8 hours every weekday; weekends don't count. Remote is discouraged." After multiple requests for all paperwork to be signed prior to leaving my previous job and only getting the Employee Handbook in return, I was presented with an onerous and overreaching employment contract on my first day.