Pros
- Free snacks - Free soda (1 per day, anyway) - Nice neighborhood
Cons
- Management is mercurial and short-sighted - Company culture is stiff and paranoid - Lack of consistent leadership or direction - The CEO micromanages like a crazy person There is a pretty obvious disparity between the positive and negative reviews for OPSWAT here on Glassdoor. Strangely enough, the positive reviews often seem to take aim at the negative reviewers as if they are weird outliers, not representative of what’s “really” happening in this company at all. That seems odd at best, disingenuous at worst. Leaving that aside, here’s a sample of my own experience working at OPSWAT: I was working from home on a project for OPSWAT at 8pm on a Sunday night when I got an email from the CEO asking me what I had produced in one very specific area of my job that quarter. I gave him the answer he’d asked for, and he responded that what I was doing wasn’t sufficient ROI for what he was paying me, and warned that I had better step it up if I wanted to keep my job. I reminded him that I worked in more than just that one specific area during any given day, and he replied back that he “didn’t like my tone,” and that we’d meet about it the following day. Keep in mind that this all happened at 8:00pm on a Sunday night, and that I was doing OPSWAT work on my own time because I wanted what I was working on to be great. I went in the next and day so I could look the CEO in the face as I quit. That’s the “hands-on” management style that some other reviewers are talking about. I suppose that some people might call it “enthusiasm”, but I think most people would recognize it as micromanagement, a lack of adequate planning and an inability to delegate appropriately. No matter what you decide to call it, it’s a haphazard and abrasive management style, and results in the kind of mind-boggling turnover rate that OPSWAT endures. I worked at OPSWAT for nearly 2 years, and received 2 promotions with considerable pay bumps during that time, which was nice. I also had three heads of my department either quit or get fired while I was there, and had 80% of the team I started with quit within a single year. That’s not an exaggeration, and there is a good reason for it; the CEO is a tyrant. OPSWAT’s got the chaotic feeling of a startup without any of the fun or profit. A company this old should not still be enduring growing pains like this, but that seems like exactly what is going on at OPSWAT. Do yourself a favor and look at jobs elsewhere. OPSWAT is a mess.
