athenahealth Employee Reviews about "senior leadership"

Pros

Salary's fine, though they will no longer give equity to new hires. It feels good to work on something that will help people. Lots of good people.

Cons

athena has always been a company in constant transition, but this last year after the acquisition has been destructive. Our new management's only goal is to sell the company for as much as possible in four years - nothing else matters. This has lead to large layoffs while we show a profit, teams attempting to work on major projects being totally under-resourced, a migration from good enterprise tools (Slack) to cheaper ones that make our jobs harder (Microsoft Teams), and a constant push to cut costs while simultaneously being told the company is in great shape and we are "getting our mojo back". This experience has eroded athena's once-famous company culture, and it's been months since I've seen a week without a goodbye email in my inbox. In addition, the hedge funds that own us has, despite their claims, an extremely short-sighted outlook for us. We had a hiring freeze after the acquisition, only reopened this quarter after we showed good numbers for last quarter. I'm told "this is just how being owned by a hedge fund works" but only being granted resources when we do well gives me zero confidence I will still have a job when something outside my control happens to make the company post a bad quarter, especially given how detached it feels like senior leadership is from their employees.

Pros

A few ago I wrote about how this was the best job I ever had. A lot has changed since then, most of it for the worst. You may be fine here, or you may not. It's definitely not a horrible place to work, but it sure seems like it some days when comparing it to how it used to be just a couple years ago. > The vast majority of the people you work with directly are awesome. > Work/life balance is fantastic. There are a days now and again where you are expected to be in the office, but usually you can work from home whenever you need to. > A lot of new projects and technology coming into play in the last year. I don't know anyone in Austin who is still writing Perl code on an ancient monolith anymore. > For the most part, the managers I've worked with over the year have been excellent and most people have a positive relationship with theirs. > The company mission is inspiring, although depending on where you land you might be doing nothing more than moving data around and not feeling inspired by your day job. > Free breakfast tacos on Mondays. Other basic free snacks and drinks are available as well.

Cons

Most of the employees right now are not unhappy. The company has been bleeding talent since last October when they laid off 10% of employees to placate a whiny shareholder. If you decide to accept an offer, you should realize that you are likely replacing someone who quit. > Senior leadership is awful in many ways. No matter how far down the ladder you are, they will make decisions that will negatively impact your morale and career on a regular basis. > The CTO, Prakash Khot, is full of bad ideas but thinks himself an infallible messiah of tech. I've never seen a leader take an organization high in morale and productivity and drag it down so low. Example: he decided a few months back that all teams across the entire company should consist of exactly 3 developers (with few exceptions). Every engineer that I've talked to about it said it is the stupidest idea that they ever heard. > Highly political and back-stabbing environment. The CTO used company-wide layoffs last October to forcefully remove the entire senior leadership team in Austin. These were the best leaders I've ever worked with in my life and did their jobs extremely well, but the CTO resented them for pushing back against his demands and often awful agenda (see: 3 developer teams). Morale in Austin has absolutely plummeted since and shows no signs of recovery. > Low autonomy for certain groups and teams. If you don't have any desire to design anything and are content with just taking orders from above, you'll be fine. > The company is notorious for re-orgs because SLT at the top are incompetent and unable to provide any stability. This often means having your project abruptly canceled (even if it's 99% done) for BS reasons like a change in SLT's "vision". About half of the projects I've worked on have been canceled for one reason or another > Career advancement isn't really based on performance, but more on luck. I've watched many great engineers be held back in their careers because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time (project got canceled on them) or had a manager who was too busy to notice their impact or didn't care. HR has taken notice and is making solid steps to improve this though.

Pros

- Can be fun if you're on the right team - Career path mobility (to move to different groups or be promoted) - Mission - Beer fridges, games, food, etc. - Good people

Cons

- Small startup mentality at a mid-sized company creates more issues than it solves - Culture is monolithic (somewhat cult-like, not necessarily terrible but not all that creative) - Technology stack is outdated, developers may not develop transferable skills - Politics, questionable senior leadership in the c-suite (JB is OK but others are in the wrong roles) - Fast-paced but slow moving (as in not very agile) - Not lots of room for those who think outside-the-box (truly creative/disruptive) - Average (at best) benefits

Pros

- Meaningful pockets of great, intelligent people - Some teams have a healthy culture (when they can insulate themselves from the madness) - If you are talented, do quality work, and can deal with absolute madness with a straight face most of the time, you will probably get promoted - Pretty decent PTO that you can actually use on some teams - Ever decreasing in frequency, yet still cool feeling that you are making some type of concrete, incremental improvements in healthcare to make things work better - For 1-5 minute bursts, the dogs in the office can have a calming, therapeutic effect, until you walk away and realize you are in a place where nothing makes sense anymore

Cons

- Senior leadership swirl and erratic decision-making push down chaos to those who have to try making sense of conflicting guidance or no guidance - Just when you are starting to figure things out and get a bit of momentum, some arbitrary, poorly communicated directive and/or another re-org makes you have to start all over again - New CTO doesn't have a clue. Compounding this, CEO seemingly doesn't have a clue that CTO doesn't have a clue. By all means, keep trying to copy and paste "well this worked at Salesforce seven years ago" solutions to a different industry in a different time and see how it goes. Hint: it's going poorly. - Odd, cult-like insistence that strict Agile will magically fix everything, at the expense of common sense in many cases - The people who are most frustrated now are increasingly the intelligent, high-performing contributors and leaders who are simply running out of patience with athena's nonsense

Pros

Before I would have said this is a great place to work for college students fresh out of school. They'll grind you down, cheat you on benefits, and underpay you, but leave you with a wealth of experience and connect you with some of the most amazing people you'll ever work with. Cloud-based technology is definitely the future, and it's a great foundational idea. However, with many of the current issues, such as layoffs and turnover, the company is highly unstable and doesn't appear that it can remain competitive in the long term. So maybe consider side-stepping this company for the year or two, and see if things turn around after that.

Cons

Poor management abounds. Senior leadership is always changing directions and focus, to the extreme frustration of clients and employees. Middle managers are untrained (I mean this literally - we have no manager training program), leading to petty kingdoms full of unprofessional leaders who play favorites and make poor decisions based on politics alone. You're generally unable to get promoted above one cohort unless you leave for another company and come back - oddly, they love this. This same culture led to the eCW situation, which is highly concerning.

Pros

Great campus, cafeteria, and bring dogs to work are all great pros.

Cons

Untrustworthy HR department. Untrustworthy senior leadership. Untrustworthy leadership in marketing. Diminishing cultural values. Below market pay. Below market healthcare benefits. Marketing leadership spends their time "listening" but not actually giving any strategic value or guidance. They sit in their glass offices and stare at dashboards all day and then ask why we aren't selling. Instead of just sitting behind a screen, and attending meetings with CEO, spend some time getting to know your own team. They pretend to listen to pain points, but neglect to do anything about it. athenahealth has lost it's way, and after massive company layoffs in the Fall, many more will leave voluntarily in Q1 of 2018. Our competitors cultures are doing better, while ours is sinking lower and lower. Athena needs better senior leadership, less politics, and much more diversity.

Pros

Excellent people at almost all levels, with a real interest in making a difference and being part of a team, so you don't usually run into a "not my problem" attitude to getting things done. Work-life balance is achievable but takes work to maintain.

Cons

Senior leadership has taken a recent turn toward cluelessness and being out-of-touch with employees, and intense political infighting. If you don't have to interact with C-suite, you'll be happier. Spending priorities on internal programs reflect increasingly short-term, generic corporate thinking.

Pros

Non-management people are terrific and a dog friendly campus make it a nice place to be. The mission still resonates and is important.

Cons

Be careful who you work for. How your life is at athena is completely dependent on who your manager is. Some manager get how athena is broken and helps you manage through it. Others throw you to the wolves, criticize everything you do and bury you in corporate politics. Senior leadership has not a single clue about the company they are running because they barricade themselves in their ivory towers and almost never mingle with the masses on a regular basis.

Pros

The mission and vision. That is what motivates me every day. I absolutely believe in the future of the company and the long term strategic direction that we are moving in.

Cons

Lack of a customer orientation around the products and services. There is a long term direction, but how we get there by ignoring our clients wants and needs feels off. There is seemingly constant turmoil at the senior leadership level and a severe lack of alignment. Re-orgs happen so frequently and are very disruptive. I've seen multiple competing and conflicting programs started, it really feels like upper management doesn't talk among itself.

Pros

Athenahealth is filled with incredibly bright engineers. During my years here I have found tremendous mentors and developed my skills greatly. I like that Athenahealth is a meritocracy where years of experience are not required for a promotion. A engineer with a few years of experience can reach the highest cohorts if they are truly performing at that level. The other thing that is awesome is the dogs! I bring mine in every day - she is the favorite employee in the office.

Cons

Senior leadership has been swung around a bit with our recent acquisition. To be honest the effects haven't been felt too much in day to day activity. It was distracting for a time period, especially given the fomo on the conspiracy slack channels. Thankfully things have stabilized.