SoftwareONE is a stressful environment for anyone who wants any sort of structure in their work life. Tasks are learned by peers or figured out on your own. Processes (or lack thereof) are rarely analyzed for improvement in efficiency or quality, because back office departments are understaffed and therefore overworked. Many employees can never stop working (through weekends, holidays, nights) because the workload is unbearable even one day is taken off. Most are afraid to take vacations, because they have no backup - literally no one else knows how to take care of their responsibilities. Employee turnover is extremely quick - most last less than 2 years, often it's less than 6 months. Management overspends on "employee morale" (sponsored events, endless amounts of free alcohol, etc.). Casual dress code is nice, but some take advantage of it - showing up in tanktops, short shorts, and flip flops to work. Any attempt to enforce "policies" or "regulations" turns into a complaint to a manager (or even the CEO) who then allows it. It seems as though each higher up has little consideration of his/her budget and allows employees to be reimbursed for almost anything (again alcohol, $100 headphones, tips that exceed the amount of the actual bill, etc.) that is supposedly a travel/SALES expense. If you're looking for feedback from a manager, you probably won't find it here. Quarterly "goals" are generally a joke. I never had a performance review (mostly because my manager didn't know most of what I did). I never had a meeting to discuss my future with the company - promotions, raises, etc. If I were to ask three coworkers the same question, I would receive three different answers. The company claims to value employees, but has started to move almost entire departments to India - only for the remaining U.S. employees to have to double their workload to fix errors from India. India is not trained properly, and time/language barriers only add to the problem. Also new-employee training has been cut (last I heard). The new-hire training in place when I started was useless to me as a back-office employee. It (along with the entire company) was geared towards SALES, without truly training the salespeople on the technical aspects of their job - like how to create a sales order correctly. Any problems originating from the SALES department usually ended up in the back office - many of which could have been solved with proper training.
