IT department is amazingly inefficient - Anonymous employee Sentry Employee Review

1.0
May 29, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The company pays pretty well for the area, and it's possible to maintain your position without doing too much work.

Cons

The data services IT department is astonishingly inefficient and wasteful. A response to another review, the company stated proudly that Sentry has the largest IT organization in central Wisconsin. I'm sure that's true, and that's exactly the problem. Sentry has thousands of people doing work that could be accomplished by about 150 skilled developers and database admins. That's not to say they don't have skilled developers--they do, but the project managers and directors tend to be incompetent and there are rarely sufficient requirements passed to developers. My department hilariously tried to implement a half-agile methodology. We had scrum meetings every other day, no sprint review, but a "sprint planning" where the project manager simply told us what we were doing the rest of the month-long sprint. The "sprints" often ended up being useless since the project manager was unable to address logistical issues by the time it ended. As a result, for months at a time I did practically nothing at work. No one really cared, because the sprints were so unproductive anyway that I blended in. I could go on for hours about this, but suffice to say, the Sentry IT department is one you want to avoid if you are interested in gaining skills for your career. If only I could get this portion of my life back...

avatar
Sentry Response
9y
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. At Sentry, we’re proud of the investments we’ve made in data capabilities and we appreciate the skilled developers within Data Services who’ve helped to deliver on these capabilities. We’re currently working on initiatives across all of IT to become more consistent in our implementation of agile techniques and methodology. We view the continued adoption and maturity of agile principles as key to becoming even more efficient in our delivery of IT services and capabilities. Thank you again for your feedback on these items. Jim Frank VP – Information Technology

Explore other reviews about Sentry

5.0
Apr 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

work life balance is great

Cons

pay is below national average

4.0
May 22, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

hybrid, very good benefits, mostly good work life balance

Cons

on call sucks so bad, more flexible work from home schedule would be nice

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All