Management has zero respect for its employees. They invest nothing in them, consistently fail to put them in position to be successful, and have no idea how to motivate or bring out the best in people. Motivation consists solely of screaming and threatening jobs. The company offers no training program or education compensation, no formal review process, and pay raises are few and far between, which is particularly problematic since Apptricity pays well below DFW market value for all positions. Employees are "rewarded" for good performance by being given more work and responsibility, without an accompanying bump in pay.
Employee morale is extremely low. New employees come in enthusiastic and have it beaten out of them within a couple of weeks by the executives' overbearing management tactics and the general dysfunction of the workplace environment. Consistently, about two-thirds of the employees are looking for work elsewhere at any given time. While Apptricity has about 100 employees at current, about twice that many have quit or been fired over the last three years. That's a truly staggering rate of attrition.
While workplace processes have become more organized over the last year, the development process is still largely a cluster. Fire drills are common due to poor planning by executives and their propensity to over-promise, and thus under-deliver to customers. Deadlines are usually pulled out of thin air and have little relation to how much work or effort is actually required to develop a product. Scope creep without an accompanying adjustment of timetables/deliverable dates is common, which results in "why isn't this project on schedule" rants from executives, followed by employees working huge amounts of unrewarded overtime. Schedules also often drift off track because the CEO or other execs pull resources off of priority projects to work on their own pet projects or fire drills. The general approach to product development at Apptricity is when choosing between doing it right and doing it fast, doing it fast always wins.
There is little real communication between departments, as department heads tend to horde as much information as possible in order to enhance their position and their group's standing at the expense of other departments. It's not uncommon for two executives to give conflicting sets of instructions to employees, with neither exec knowing that this is the case. This usually results in employees being screamed at, having their competency called into question, or fired simply because they didn't know which set of instructions to follow, or worse, dared to ask for clarification. This creates an environment where employees go out of their way not to ask questions or stick their necks out, for fear that they will have their heads chopped off for doing so. Group managers are managers in name only. They are often given no title to convey to anyone outside of their group that they are in charge, are given no real authority or responsibility, but are held accountable as if they have.
