Typical souless corporation full of small minded people - Senior Software Developer Pitney Bowes Employee Review

I encourage you to read the whole thing. Yes I know it's a lot but it might save you form making a huge mistake. About PB in general: PB is typical, heartless American corporation. It sees declining core business (mailing) so tries to stay afloat by stepping into software. It does that by buying companies. Problem is PB doesn't know what to do with those companies so ends up running them into the ground, milking the products as long as it can and then... buying another company. Example - PB bought a company that was a .NET shop. They pretty much threw away all the products bar one and moved all devs to JAVA. WHY would you do that? Just to destroy a company? They weren't even competition. Another example - several companies (making totally different products) are acquired at the same time. PB fires all but one sales team who now is supposed to sell it all. So 1 team from 1 of those companies handles everything. People used to selling boxed soft for couple hundred usd are now also selling 100k+ usd enterprise software they have never seen before. Genius. And 6 months later PB wonders why sales have gone down to almost zero. This so called synergy is good for a short boost in stock price I suppose. PB runs on dividends - so no matter how it really performs it has to pay shareholders. This would work if you had steady income. PB doesn't. PB is only interested in new sales. If you don't sell new licences, you don't exist. This creates a situation where a mature product, raking in tens of millions a year in maintenance fees is marginalised in favour or something that might earn 5-10 million a year. So you're killing off your income base that funds R&D hoping that new stuff works out. And in the past it didn't. Oh, and new CEO prefers options to high salary (previous one was raking in 10+ milion USD /annum). So get ready for some serious cost cutting so that his options could yield the return he's counting on. -------------------- About PB Software: PB has simple rules: 1) You have to be happy. You will be happy. No matter what. Even if they have to force you to be happy. If official grievance route is what it takes to force you to be happy - so be it. 2) No negativity. Any negative or critical comment is treated as treason and warrants punitive action. 3) Having a personal opinion and exhibiting any independent thought not along the lines of "PB is great" is treated as negativity (see point 2) 4) Buttering up is the way to go. It doesn't matter if you do your job well. It doesn't matter if you do it at all. What matters is if you are "visible". You can be totally useless and still climb the ladder by being "visible" (ie. VPN in at say 8pm and send an email to your boss, volunteer for stuff that you know you'll dump on others and take the credit etc.) All managers seem to play plausible deniability game. They are not interested in solving problems. They will not accept that a manager can be a problem. They would rather make you go away than solve a problem. It is most likely that any issue you present to your manager will be soon turned into more work for you. In fact managers of almost all levels seem to be there to pat themselves and others on the back, make speeches (US style) and... that's pretty much it. If you have a problem with a manager you might as well leave. You will get NO support form anywhere. Your manager's manager will NOT be interested in helping. In fact will probably blindly, without hearing YOUR part of the story agree with your manager. HR will be there to ensure you cannot possibly hurt the company in any way. The best you can hope for is PB "helping you find other opportunities outside the company" - meaning you were right, caught a manager on a "no-no" and PB had to brush it under the carpet. PB has this grand idea of "one team". On the surface it sounds good - everyone in it together, helping each other out etc. In reality, however, it's not that great. We're "one team" when there's a success to latch onto. If project is failing it's "dev this, qa that, management something else (not our fault)". And even if its going well there's still one more catch - performance appraisal. "One team" means the whole product line, all the teams are "one team" that succeeds and fails together. So your raise depends on someone in USA or in India who may or may not be doing a good job. In other words - the deck is stacked against you no matter what. Doing good work isn't going to help you since the "one team" clause can always bring you down a peg or two. The house always wins. PB Software is approaching a critical point where there are as many managers as people doing the actual work. The peculiar situaiton would be funny if it didn't mean that all those managers have to find something to do. This means endless, pointless meetings and micromanagement at all levels. Red tape everywhere... PB wants to make a ton of money without investment. They want to use open source (meaning "free") software and tools. Anything that costs money is a problem. Unless it's travel across the pond for managers - that always gets funds. Forget training (ok, there is Udemy available), forget learning or development. Forget raises. Bonus doesn't exist here either. PB is not interested in its customers. I know that's not what they say but actions speak louder than words. If they cared they wouldn't run a ghost ship of a dev shop with barely enough devs and qa to keep the customer problems at bay (let alone enhancements) PB is only interested in staying afloat till current lot can cash in. The pattern is always the same - buy a company, apply synergy (let go most of the staff), ride the products are long as you can and at the end of the line close the shop, rinse, wash, repeat.