Frontiers reviews

My review pertains to the main office, which employs the most people. It is run on a somewhat militant, hierarchical and procedures-based structure. Atmosphere here is quite tense. The Swiss office of course is especially competitive for just being where it is and people doing anything to get and keep a job. Some teams function well, staffed by great people, others don't with some being outright toxic. In these dysfunctional sections the hierarchy is based neither on expertise nor on experience in the field but time of arrival at the company. This leaves them headed by junior & entry level career folks lacking credentials and the required temperament to manage a team. If and until you transition to another department, you'll face jealously guarded positions of authority, patronizing emails, and correct work "corrected' (downgraded) by an insecure manager, literally saying "this is how we'll do it because I'm the manager." Again, this review pertains to pockets of total failure in the office, but is not intended as a blanket statement as some teams are highly functioning on both the business and office ends.. In the toxic pockets however, what's best for the journal takes a backseat to egos. Ideas and projects pitched are often not comprehended (this is why you need experts) or worse, get a reaction of "why didn't I come up with this and how can I make it go away" played out through passive aggressive retaliation. One arena for this is the performance reviews, used vindictively to reinforce authority. It is the prefect platform to rank and yank, so those naive enough to ever counter the misguided ideas of the immature manager, can be fired legally. The performance review is just paper trail; it's a dog and pony show. All it takes is withholding tasks, spacing out projects given and writing up the helpless guy for not meeting set targets. This aberrant pattern has been employed a few times over the years within a certain clique. Leadership is clueless to this clique. On the bright side, if you are lucky to end up on a good team, you will work with amazing folks, doing amazing work.

The problem with Frontiers is actually that they don't have a clear path to where they want to go in the IT side of the company. The higher IT management people are so wrong, that they actually are not in the capacity of analyzing the problems they are facing, i.e. if they have IT problem to solve, their solutions instead of focusing on business and add value to their products are just patches to create technologies (workarounds) in which thousand of professionals worked with before. Management is about focusing for getting value on your current product, you should not be influenced by technical nonsense's from i.e. Srcum Masters. Also, besides of focusing on powering their publishing brand with IT solutions, they are wasting so much resources and money trying to reinvent the wheel. In IT you can be really smart or really not smart going in the opposite direction, but they are not smart enough IMO..