1mo
We have reviewed your comments with utmost care. The picture they paint is not one we recognise, and the facts deserve to be on record.
Empower is a process-driven, team-managed organisation. Sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives and code reviews are owned by the engineering teams on Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Confluence, Slack and Microsoft Teams. 100% of our delivery team has completed structured AI upskilling tracks; we now operate as an AI-first services company. None of that is consistent with stopwatch management.
Long-term retention — of people and of clients — is the proof. Four colleagues are in their 18th year associated with Empower. Ten are in the 10+ year cohort, twenty-three in the 5+ year cohort. Multiple client relationships are in their 15th year and beyond, across nine countries. That curve is not sustained by suspicion.
On the suggestion that long-tenured colleagues “flatter” management, we respectfully reject it. Loyalty earned over a decade and a half of mentoring, delivering and renewing clients is not sycophancy.
On client communication: every Empower developer is embedded in the client's own Slack or Teams channel and is directly answerable to the client through stand-up meetings and calls — daily on many engagements, with weekly governance calls on all of them. The client speaks to the developer every working day. Concealing a developer's absence is structurally impossible under that model — it is neither a policy we have nor a behaviour our delivery setup permits.