Poetic Systems Reviews

Management • Poor management - Management is usually out of the loop about a lot of things. Requests for vacations, meetings, etc. occasionally get forgotten or they are simply unaware of them. • Lack of transparency - It's a small office so we hear about everything that’s going on. We can obviously tell when management is not telling the truth or is telling other people different things. • Micromanaging - Regardless of the quantity of work available, it seems as management's main focus is that everyone is putting in 40 hrs. You will be asked to log your time daily and account for your day in detail (15 min here, 1.5 hr here, 2 hr here, 30min here, etc). Additionally you will be questioned if your weekly hours are below 40 hrs regardless of whether all of the work has been completed or even if there is enough work for everyone on the team to have 40 hrs a week. • Not Flexible - Expectation to work and be in office is 8am-4pm (during office days not remote days). Even if you're working remotely, If you need to step away for a few hours (ex. go get COVID vaccine), you need to request the time off otherwise management will have a "talk" with you regardless of whether you were going to work the extra time after 4pm or told your manager. • Unprofessionalism - Management will gossip about employees to other employees and constantly bring them up even after they have left the company. Professional/Work • No structure/documentation - There was no sort of orientation or onboarding when first hired. There is typically no documentation as knowledge is typically retrieved by asking other employees. • Very low salaries - Management believes they are paying fair salaries. Entry level employees are being offered between 45-50k. Mid-senior level are making 50-90k. Very few are in the 80-90k range. • High turnover rate - This is a company of about 40 people. Since January 2021, 23 employees quit. 12/23 were developers and almost all of them were mid to senior level. Only 1 has been replaced. • Poor transfer of knowledge - With each person who has left, a lot of knowledge has been lost and not been properly transferred over. This has left a lot of gaps and confusion within the remaining team. • No support - With such a small team remaining, all the weight of the projects are put on the few developers left. You will likely be working on multiple projects, which can be overwhelming, and if you encounter any blockers you will more than likely have no one to turn to for help. • No clear path/professional development - With no support or importance placed on developer growth, learning and progressing is limited to what you learn independently. Because of the lack of senior developers, there is hardly any mentorship either. There is no clear path on how to advance within ranks which makes it difficult to see how to advance within the role.

The management situation really couldn't be more second-rate. The CEO regularly tours prospective clients around the office and, as a show of "attention to quality", will openly critique mockups and code that is currently in-development. This is already humiliating in the moment, but the changes often go against development best practices and ignore previous considerations for other parts of the project. Project management is equally lacking. While their existing process might work fine for a smaller company, their process places almost all responsibility on the developer. Repeatedly, I was handed designs for websites, and given a due-date (usually 2-3 months out). That was the end of the project-management process during my time. I had people I could ask about issues that came up during development, and the designers were always available, but there were no check-ins during the development process. This resulted in a large number of projects not being completed on time, and going over-budget. I know efforts have been made to remedy this, but my understanding is that many of these core problems continue to linger. Salary was quite a slap-in-the-face, but it took some time in the industry for me to realize this. I left Poetic Systems for nearly double the salary (which was not hard), and they were disturbingly stingy with raises (all raises were only to keep up with inflation, despite being one of the more advanced team members). I have spoken with numerous other employees that have expressed the same frustrations. If you have worked in web development for any time at all, then I can almost guarantee that you can earn significantly more money. I also expressed my desire to learn about the other development team's work (there are 2 primary teams, App Team and Drupal Team), but was instead told to focus on my current team's work.