Talent management is pretty abysmal, and due to growing pains, if you start in professional services, expect to be there for a long time. One product in particular is growing faster than they can hire people to keep up.
While there are good people in middle management, there are some awful project managers that seem to keep right on trucking despite not knowing their product well and have no idea how to scope, which of course all rolls down hill to the consultants and engineers. To be fair, there are some project managers that are affable and pretty good. And because they are pretty good, you won't spend much time with them.
Operations is a mess - while there are good people all over the place, no one really directs them. You will sit through meeting after meeting after meeting talking about better organizing things, but none of it ever happens. It's essentially a free-for-all when it comes to booking hours. One dedicated ops manager to just direct traffic could probably clean it up in no time, but I'm not sure there is much interest.
Unlimited PTO is really a thing, and you can really do it. However, like everything else in life, there are no free lunches. Because of Accruent's continued use of stack ranking, taking PTO could mean never getting promoted if you insist on taking time when there is a crisis. And because there is always a crisis, you can never be sure if by taking time off you are going to rub someone the wrong way, hurting your opportunities for a raise or promotion. My sense was managers really didn't expect you to take a week off at a time here and there as much as just feeling free to take a personal day when you were getting burnt out. Personally, I'd rather just have a set number of days each year I can take off when I saw fit without having to worry if I was taking too much or too little time.
In the end, I saw no reason to stay. I easily increased my salary by 50% by just leaving. Yes you work with smart people Yes, some of them can be hilarious, but if I wanted to be entertained, I'd watch Netflix. When you really start asking why you are working 10 hours a day and sometimes over the weekend yet still only making enough money to live paycheck to paycheck, and when you start realizing that the opportunities to progress beyond entering data into thousands and thousands of lines of a spread sheet are limited by necessity, you start wondering why you are there. You can easily work less in Austin for the same money or work the same in Austin for a whole lot more. There's really just no reason to be here any longer than you have to be.
Additionally, there is no mechanism to maintain company knowledge. The powers-that-be are simply too cheap to really invest in any software to catalog and retain knowledge. Every time someone realizes the above, they take with them everything they know, leaving very little behind. Years of experience simply vanish because there is no real interest in trying to hang on to it. Then again, when you notice more efforts to streamline onboarding and get new-hires billable ASAP than improving what is there and retaining knowledge, you don't have to be a genius to see what the real game is.
I didn't have to be there anymore, so I moved on.
My advice if you are taking a job here, particularly if you are one of those coming from a retail, food & beverage, or service background trying to get into tech, is to come in with a clear plan of what you want to learn at an entry level job, an idea of where you want to be next, how you will use your experiences at Accruent to get to the next job, and a clear timeline as to how long you want to stay at Accruent before moving on. While I'm sure many in management would find this term abhorrent as they are all basically good people, you are being used. They are leveraging your lack of experience against your potential to pay you as little as possible. This process is making some people a lot of money somewhere. Be professional, but don't feel bad about using them for your own ends as well.
