Autoshop Solutions Reviews

I was not employed with this company for a long period of time, but in my short tenure there, I saw several people fired and some who worked for a day and never returned. Employees: Young people, often fresh from college are hired. Typically, companies do this to foster growth and mold young people into the best employee for the company. At Autoshop Solutions, this is not the case. Employees are not compensated well, and get little to no insurance benefits. The company claims to have a work/life balance, but you are judged harshly if it's learned you have a life and that you want to live it. Only people with children are afforded the opportunity to come in late, volunteer at Field Day, or leave early to pick up the kids. Although the typical employee is around 25, many of my colleagues were extremely talented and knowledgeable about their field. Unfortunately, this led to management (who had no knowledge of current marketing strategies or web design/development) to feel extremely threatened by anyone who had intelligence. While there is a 90-day "trial period" (not uncommon at many companies), the belief is that employees who don't fit the mold are disposable. They don't vet the employee or check references on new hires. The attitude is "we'll just see if they work and if not, they're gone." This is awful for the company and for the employee who is given false hope of job security. Management: Aside from feeling threatened by intelligence, the owner/CEO comes across as extremely sexist by predominantly hiring pretty girls regardless of their qualifications. He also likes to take them to trade shows to chat up potential clients in a male dominated industry (auto mechanics). The three members of management also encourage you to speak freely in a one-on-one talk, but if you say something that someone doesn't want to hear, you're on the chopping block. Management also ridicules you if you have a personality or lifestyle choice (gay/vegetarian/atheist/democrat) that doesn't 100% fit what they think of as "normal." During a particularly drama-filled and chaotic time, the CEO gathered the entire company for a meeting and said, "I don't want to hear about any more drama. From here on out, this is a drama-free workplace. While you are all valuable, I can easily replace each of your positions." That is a direct quote. I wrote it down as he was saying it. Decision-Making: As other reviews have stated, many "high-priority" projects were abandoned or completely redone because they were not thought through and the goals were not clearly outlined from the beginning. No respect was given to the graphic designers or web-development team for their work - they were only asked why a logo couldn't be created in 2 days or why a website couldn't be built in 3 days. Each client was looked at as more money on the bottom-line and no client truly got a customized website, even though that is what Autoshop Solutions preaches. I also know the company is creating incentives for employees who post positive reviews about the company. This is leading to a false view of the organization.

You are payed well if you are liked, not according to the market value of your skills. You are respected by the owner if he likes you, not if you do a good job and are talented. High turnover rate. I saw several employees get fired without warning. There were many times I was afraid I'd be fired simply for not being liked by the owner. Employees were often reminded by the owner that they were replaceable. -------------- In terms of dealing with the actual work, these were my pain points: No care for quality or craftsmanship: The person in charge of the developers has no background in technology. Quality was simply assumed, never checked. This lead to very bad craftsmanship getting through the pipeline. I had to replace either entire websites or parts of websites because they were poorly done and no one was checking. Very disorganized: A website build was assigned to me directly by my supervisor, but it was not scheduled on the calendar. About a week later, the same website was assigned to another developer, and he built it unknowingly. When we finally realized that he built it for no reason, he was basically done with the build. Disjointed work flow: The company does a very poor job at process management. There is no firm process of website production, which leads to headaches when dealing with difficult clients. Decisions are rarely stuck to: After coming to an agreement in production meetings about a process / policy, it was very often the case that the thing that was agreed upon was forgotten about or not enforced. Clients always get what they want, no matter how ridiculous the idea is: When I worked there, changes to websites are relayed directly from the customer to the developer by people in the marketing department with little to no experience in web technologies. It didn't matter if what the customer wanted wasn't good for their site, them asking for it was good enough. Very poor time management: Developers are almost never consulted about whether a special project is feasible (in terms of time). It simply gets assigned with the assumption that it's not difficult or time intensive. Very whimsical decision making: A coworker was asked to build a large web application. After he built it and showed the owner, the owner decided he wanted something very different. Instead of taking the time to carefully plan a large project, the owner simply had it redone because he didn't like the result of his first set of instructions.