Dynata reviews

*Glassdoor/Dynata please stop removing my review. * My goal in writing this is and coming forward with my thoughts is to ultimately help my teammates enter into a more appropriately professional/healthy work environment and be transparent with people that are looking to work here. In the office, I never, in my professional career, encountered such bullying, harassment, favoritism and hazing (especially women on women). Management style is not appropriate for a company with Dynata's goals and is not conducive to safe work environment. Management has made derogatory remarks such as "Last one in gets fired!"during a team lunch when we first round layoffs were happening immediately after the merger with SSI and “we haven’t lost anyone important” after multiple people have left this team in a matter of months is disheartening and scary for team members to hear at work. Management conducts blatant hazing, stalking, and micromanaging. Everything from looking to trade a person to another team if they are no longer “needed” to monitoring social media at odd hours to “keep tabs” on an employee, and then use their social life against them at work. I would also like to note that not one manager followed me the entire time I was employed - they were actively looking at/for me. This was incredibly invasive and was used as ammo against me. Another example of hazing was in response to my request on information for unpaid time off due to a family matter. The incredulous part of this response was that management mandated that if I needed to work remote I would have to use vacation time to do so and that I was still required to work. Generally in emails requesting information and examples from management and leadership, my requests were denied, evaded, and I went 6 months without a 1:1 with the team lead. I believe to avoid confrontation. Because the atmosphere is so toxic at Dynata, when I got sick I was afraid to go to the doctor for fear that leadership would take action against me. I believe many people have felt the same. This led to more stress and increasingly related health issues. This fear only stopped when I had to take medical leave for organ failure. I cannot remember how many countless times I have had to hide behind doors and crouch down in cubicles when I went to visit my other co-workers on different teams management passed by. Employees on my team spend an unreasonable amount of time and energy concerned on management's perception of their simple every day activities instead of their overall accounts and business performance. I know that people have spoken to HR management, but there is a breach of confidentiality with HR, so be warned that if you discuss anything to HR, it is not in confidence. In conclusion, I believe my team leader at Dynata has established a fearful workplace environment that I believe is overall detrimental for the team and the company in the long run. A true leader would promote their employees, trust their employees, and be present around their employees. Unfortunately, I do not believe this is occuring and the environment it is creating is utterly toxic to Dynata.

Top 10 Things You Will Need To Know 1. ResearchNow will tell you what you want to hear to get you in the door. Most companies do this to some degree. This company is really bad about exaggerating how hip and cool their development environment will be. You are a cost center to the business. 2. The domain you will be working in (Market Research / Surveys) is really boring. They are the annoying people who send you emails asking you to take product surveys. 3. If you are working on the supply side of the IT shop, you are inheriting a system that was developed by some of the worst software engineers ever. Luckily, they’ve all been canned. Unfortunately for you, you get to maintain that mess. 4. The team is almost all new people. That is a bad sign. There were only two original developers out of dozens left. Some of those they assigned to the QA team. You don’t want to get assigned to the QA team. That’s how they tell you that you are about to be fired. Definitely ask them about turnover at the company. And remember point number one above. Be skeptical. 5. Every employee is required to go to “high performance” employee training, including the engineers. This is widely known and not a trade secret. It involves things like “making positive assumptions about people” and “having adult to adult conversations” with your peers. Not surprisingly, the engineers did not respond well to kindergarten behavioral training. People who complained about it were threatened with termination. So if you are an introvert, know that you will have to make a video about yourself and present it to the entire class. Oh, and ... be sure to jump two inches higher when they put the weights on your ankles. It will make sense shortly. 6. This is a company that does not like when engineers challenge management decisions. Best policy is to keep your head down and get your work done. Speaking up will result in you being labeled a dissident. If it continues, you will be moved to the QA Team. And as an engineer, you don't want that. People were physically moved multiple times and put on multiple different teams in 9 months and we had zero say in the matter. It is a very top down management style, unlike what they said one the phone or in the interviews. 7. If you like working for Agile teams, they practice Agile in name only. It is a command and control environment where your manager will pull stories into the sprint on the second to last day of the sprint and you’ll be expected to play the hero and get ‘er done. This allows your manager to be as much of a coward as possible and say yes to requests . And if you don’t deliver, it’s the developer’s fault. Sprints are two weeks long, but that only includes development. They then allow two more weeks for QA to complete their testing. Development does not continue until the code is promoted to production. And the code base is such a mess and there is such a lack of automated tests that sprints sometime take 3 months to complete. So yeah, this is pretty much the worst Agile environment in the industry. 8. The default amount of vacation for all employees is two weeks. You get a third week after year five. But if you hold out during the interview process, they can make an exception no matter what they tell you. Hold out for at least three weeks. 9. If you need a tool like IntelliJ to do your job, you will have to write a three paragraph essay (minimum) to justify the cost. And yes, that does include the editor that you use to do your job every day. 10. As you can imagine, team morale is very low. And why wouldn't it be? Would you be excited to come to work at a place like this? Best of luck to you.