Gosh, where to begin. This company is a vulture that buys smaller companies and then devours them. They bought the company that I was working in and promised that nothing would change and then they would listen to us and take our thoughts, opinions and ideas into consideration before making any changes. What followed was a chaotic dismantling of everything that made the previous company successful. We had a good reputation, good ratings, strong processes, happy customers and employees. We were a company that people wanted to work for, and the average length of an employee's time was over 10 years. Many employees were there for 20 years. But System C came in and destroyed all the processes that worked so well and made us and our product so successful. Then they sprung a load of pointless layoffs (intending to scare the existing employees into submission). They got rid of some good, hard-working, talented employees and kept untalented people around. Of course, this led to a large chunk of the talented, senior developers leaving of their own free will. We all saw the writing on the wall. The level of stupid decisions made by the management was unbelievable. For example, we already had a dedicated and experienced testing team who knew the product inside out and were skilled at finding problems and reporting to us developers. Of course, the management decided that having talented people isn't good and decided to outsource the testing to a contracting company that hired incompetent testers from abroad, which ended up wasting countless hours of developer time to help them. I am so glad I left. The main catalyst for me leaving was how my fellow colleagues were treated during performance reviews. After the wave of layoffs, the remaining employees had to take up extra responsibilities without any extra pay. This was argued away as "we need to see how well you do with the responsibilities before we give you more money". We all thought that was fair enough. 6 months later, we had performance reviews and those who had gone above and beyond their jobs to take on extra responsibilities naturally gave themselves the highest rating, but the management decided they didn't like that and downgraded all those employees and we were told that we were being judged against our new responsibilities, rather than being judged as having taken on more responsibilities. This injustice against my fellow colleagues made things crystal clear for me. The company would just move the bar higher and higher everytime you took on more responsibilities in order to prevent people getting pay rises. This marked the end of my time with the company. This was the biggest kick in the teeth and frankly unacceptable. They also got rid of all the perks and socials that we had, claiming that "they were looking into it", after over 1 year, nothing has come of it. Lies, deception and terrible management. If you are considering this company, I have one thing to say to you: "Run fast, and run far". This company is not worth the stress. There also seems to be a culture of fear and intimidation within the company.
