Autosoft FAQ

Pros

Very competitive base salary and benefits package. Amazing work/life balance. The staff that I interacted with was very talented and easy to work with.

Cons

Extremely high turnover across the company. While the market is red hot at the moment, the inability to retain talent is telling. Career growth / advancement opportunities are limited or non-existent and performance evaluations (when they occur) are incredibly informal. Even when they do occur they don't account for much. No formalized raise and/or bonus structure. There is a general lack of ownership & understanding of the product. It isn't uncommon for outage calls to consume 15+ people from most teams trying to determine who owns the problem, steps for resolution, etc. It isn't terrible, but there is a certain level of micromanagement occurring that can be annoying. Teams are extremely siloed and there isn't an effective strategy in place to communicate across the teams for things like over-arching code changes, changes to best practices / patterns, and other things like that. There is a bunch of "old guard" spread out across the organization so making changes to "how things are done here" can be challenging. The company goal is to "grow as big as possible" which isn't very inspiring . Leadership is extremely dialed in to the Glassdoor score and incentivizes staff to post favorable reviews which you can see if you compare the Nov/Dec 2021 reviews to the rest of the reviews in 2021.

Advice to Management

Artificially inflating the Glassdoor score doesn't fix the underlying problems that caused the score to fall in the first place. I think if you focused on some of the items in the negative reviews that have been left, you would see the score increase organically. However if the organization can't afford to do raises and bonuses (as an example), that is ok, but at least be transparent with the staff about it. I don't know how many times I heard from management that 'its being worked on', 'they are coming', or some other similar comment that didn't materialize. If you do decide to implement these programs please make sure the details of the program are black and white and that you do enough analysis to understand if the company can afford it so that you don't have to move the goal posts / cancel the program at the last minute. The snafu with the wellness benefit during the fall is a good example of how a well meaning program can cause so much angst for the staff. I believe that GO has an opportunity in the market, but I am not sure if the company has the correct leadership in place to execute the plan properly. My line manager was fantastic and I always felt that she had my back, but the senior leaders weren't very inspiring during their quarterly calls and I am not sure if they even liked each other. And, at least for the development team, it didn't feel like there was a unifying vision on what a given process should be, how we were going to handle some of the bigger problems, and so on. It felt like a free-for-all between all the teams.

Pros

The pay was competitive, as were the benefits.

Cons

The culture, starting at the top. It seemed the best way to get ahead was to just agree with whatever the leadership already thought, no matter how many times they flip-flopped or changed directions. When given direction on a project, we would get two weeks in, and *boom* the leadership would see something they liked and completely overhaul everything. To further exacerbate matters, we would often be pinged well after work hours to have a discussion about the latest brands leadership liked, an ever-changing list that would force us to redesign everything we worked on up to that point.

Advice to Management

If you hire someone to do a job, trust them to do it. Micromanaging, constantly changing direction, and consistently asking your employees to discuss the projects during their family time is fair to the people doing the actual work. It’s schizophrenic and unhealthy.

Pros

Strong dev shop, fun work environment. Remote long before covid

Cons

Everything is a top priority emergancy. What's is not the top priority comes in as priority 1. The company has been trying to correct grossly under market value salaries for 3 year but is not willing to actually pay market.

Pros

Good benefits and work life balance

Cons

Salaries are on the low side

Pros

Good pay plan at first Benefits

Cons

CEO doesn't seem to want to be in the business, inherited from father. New product has no OEM certifications forced to sell legacy product. Very narrow target list of dealers that they can be a good fit

Advice to Management

Go ahead and sell the company. Maybe the next owner will be more stable and passionate.

Pros

- Good work/life balance - Good team - Good coworkers - Fair salary

Cons

- Mismanagement from the top - Vague/non-existent annual raise policy - Very high deductible health insurance - New CFO who thinks telling everyone about his second home is relatable

Advice to Management

Autosoft has the potential to be a great company. It really does. The main challenge, though, is the CEO owns the company and inherited it. He never went to business school, and though he's doing his best, he does -not- know how to run a company. If the CEO hired a President to run the company, and then just stepped back and became the private investor, Autosoft could turn around and become extraordinary inside of a year. A good business person could do a LOT and launch Autosoft to the level of success the CEO dreams of. Until that happens, though, Autosoft is -always- going to be held back by the CEO's worries and concerns and uncertainty, because he doesn't know how to successfully run a software company. Delay after delay happens, unnecessarily, because the CEO thinks of software like a construction project, not like a software platform. Hire a president, Bryce. For your own sake, hire a president, sit back, and you might finally start to recoup your investment money and be proud of your company in front of your peers at NADA.

Pros

There are some bright and caring people there. It can be fairly easy work. You can easily head down and get stuff done, flexible in most senses.

Cons

you get siloed onto projects and that can be bad. managers rarely last a year. your pay will be a lot below market value. and the market adjustments will never get you near what you should be making.

Advice to Management

What management? Oh, well, to the people left, give better salaries and pay people before they leave you, cause if you can't actually be competitive, you won't last long.

Pros

Great team Awesome support wonderful work environment

Cons

The pay is kinda meh

Advice to Management

Provide more opportunities for advancement and additional income