Great work life balance - Software Developer CentralSquare Technologies Employee Review

The Proposals Team is amazing. The manager and director are supportive, knowledgeable, and fair. The team is hard-working, skilled, and friendly. I will miss them! If you are worried about the other reviews about CentralSquare, the Proposals Department has been insulated from cuts (except for a part-time position), and they try to balance the workload for job security.

It is a very large company, so there are some silos between departments.

Immediate teams and coworkers are great to work with, friendly, collaborative, and committed to delivering the best value to the company's clients. The flexible PTO is nice but the "unlimited" aspect of it is subjective as a con. Most roles are fully remote now, but so are many organizations post-epidemic era.

There are so many to list, but it is itemized below. Low pay, no direction, ancient tech stack, forced use of AI, yearly terminations. My experience working here in the last months has been dismal. Most of the cons I have read in reviews of this organization from other people who have worked over 5 years here are true. These are not simple grievances written by bitter employees who have spent too long at the company; instead they are indicative of underlying issues not being acknowledged and addressed. Almost all of these problems are due to poor leadership and bad decision making from the VP level all the way up to the executive. There is no clear direction in this company and priorities frequently change depending on who is listened to at any time. This organization is also owned by large venture capital firms who drive down their demands with all regard given to investors and none for the clients this org serves. "Doing More with Less" Mentality: * Layoffs happen every year even when staff is told it was the best fiscal year on record. It doesn't matter how well the company says it's doing. It doesn't matter how much product knowledge or years at the company you have or how valuable you are. You're a number on a spreadsheet. * Expectations keep going up as employee count and product knowledge goes down. Lost staff is never replaced and executives have made it clear they don't want to hear about it anymore. * Overseas outsourcing is used to fill gaps and it doesn't work well. It's cheaper but insufficient. * Remaining staff is overworked and burdened due to picking up job functions from terminated employees. Company keeps pressuring for more output every year and vehemently refuses to listen to feedback about the feasibility of this. * Staff is told that AI usage will enable us to do more work with reduced numbers. More on that below. * Collaboration between employees and upper management has largely ended. The structure is now entirely one direction top-to-bottom. Feedback given on yearly surveys is ignored and no action plans are created any longer to fix issues. * Many employees are now worried more about keeping their heads down "quietly quitting" rather than being innovative out of fear of being on the next yearly termination list. Compensation & Benefits: * Salaries here are well below industry average for the region this company exists in, at least 15-25% below. * Annual salary increases for most are a meager 2-3% which of course is well below economic inflation. * Promotions and career growth are mostly non-existent and there are no other ways to earn a salary increase short of finding a new job at a different organization. * The annual bonus is reduced in any way possible so you never get the full benefit, by means most employees cannot control or directly contribute to (like EBITDA) other than marketing/sales. * Unlimited/flexible PTO is a gambit as people familiar with the scheme are aware. Most employees will take less PTO each year than plans with static amounts of it. * Employer 401K match only applies if you stay the full year, no matter how long you've been with the organization. AI Adoption & Infrastructure: * This company is following one of the industry trend paths of attempting to perform all coding, documentation, and communication with AI instead of wisely using it as an assistant tool like it should be. * Expectations of performance increase by forcing AI usage are grossly out of scope with the reality of what can presently be achieved. They read the flashy headlines and ignored the realistic stories by the people who make use of it. * Leadership clearly had no idea how much AI usage costs, starting with aggressive usage requirements to being told to be more conservative with AI prompts. It's almost like zero effort or research was done to measure usage and costs. * Heavy spending on AWS migration to cram a retrofit of the company's ancient proprietary software into an ill-conceived "cloud ready" architecture because of current industry trends. * Leadership has bought into the sales pitch that AI usage will increase work output by an unrealistically large percentage. They ignore evidence to the contrary and think that more training is the way to go rather than facing evidence-based reality. * AI training is tuned more for new software and large features via spec-driven development, despite most work being maintenance and bug fixes. * Employees are forced to speak positively about AI usage in regular meetings and valid critique is suppressed. * Refusal to listen to rational arguments of AI utilization and a measured approach to properly move software to a cloud-hosted environment has caused total structural collapse and lack of direction throughout the organization. Archaic Technology & Knowledge Void: * The software tech stack is multiple decades old, with many home-grown proprietary apps and services. The people who wrote them are long gone as is most of the talent that could have maintained this software. * Very few employees remain who can write or understand code written in the languages of the oldest software and those who can are close to retirement. * Because of yearly terminations and retention loss from employees abandoning ship, valuable expertise is lost year after year and not replaced. No incentives exist to retain people and efforts to do so have ceased. * Career advancement and growth is largely non-existent for tech staff. Remaining an employee for more than a few years is detrimental to your career as your skills stagnate. This is very misaligned with the fact that it also takes years to get familiar and effective working with the organization's software.