Terrible place to work - Sales Aspen Systems Employee Review

The owner is a wonderful person. There is a good knowledge base throughout the company and everyone is eager to push each other forward. They are fair in their OT offered. It is a healthy environment to thrive in whether you are in the office or work remotely.

The important things to know about the database are in about 10 different locations and at times it is hard to know what is the best step forward because of all the different places you need to check first.

The people other than the CEO are chill and there is lunch on Wednesday. The internal software is pretty neat and the internal software developer listens to feedback and will change the design to fit the workflow where possible. You get to go to cool places and see cool stuff and meet cool people that might land you a connection later. You get the last week of December off paid and the pay is better than retail or food service but way way worse than a normal job in the same industry. It's full time with no set shifts, so you can take off whenever as long as you have pto saved up, and they will hire entry level with only hobby experience.

Travel don't count towards overtime, so you get massively shorted on pay when you go to a client site. Management has been told and won't do anything about it because of the CEO. On average, someone quits or gets fired about every six weeks and the CEO still thinks it's because they "aren't hiring the right people" when former employees can get way better jobs after leaving. The hiring is fine, but the employees start hating the company after a while. There are no benefits until after 90 days, the pto is less than one day per month for your first year after the 90 days, and the 401K match maxes out at 4%. Nothing in HR ever happens on time and people are constantly referencing the handbook or policy when they make up rules, but said rules are never consistent and aren't even in the handbook. For example, they won't promote because they claim there's a rule where you have to wait a full year after your last review or you have to have worked there for two years to get a certain title, but the handbook says promotions aren't based on time. The CEO is bad at emotional regulation. The managers try to protect their own teams, but if he's in a bad mood because sales are bad, he comes in and finds a random excuse to yell at the production techs. The CEO won't adapt his workflow to fit the rest of the company, so the rest of the team has to adapt around him. He tells you to do things a certain way but doesn't remember his previous instructions, so whether you get yelled at is down to whether or not he feels inconvenienced that particular time, not because of what you did. The paystubs don't report hours right, there's mistakes, and he cuts off the pay period randomly. Workflows are constantly changing because they're trying to optimize processes, but it takes so much time to redesign and retrain that it actually just slows everything down more and there's no way to keep written instructions updated. The best you can hope for is when they're focused on messing up a different department and leave you alone for a while to figure out the new setup. Every time there's an incident, they try to build in a new reactionary rule with a handbook update or software update instead of looking at the situation and treating people like people. Then the rules conflict which causes processes to get stuck or the rules get ignored.