NRC Health reviews

senior and junior management are not very good to employees. Take a long time for management to get back to you. The hiring process was about 3 or 4 months

- Acquired a great company that 'did Agile right'', fired 1/3rd of the employees immediately during a recession to look better to public investors, and gradually managed most of the remaining acquired talent out over the next two years. I tend to think that big actions like this tell you a lot about a company's overall values. I know NRC is a business, but there are businesses with differnt philosophies out there. - Switched to waterfall life-cycle mid-product cycle from Agile (think minimal Agile documentation, no risk assessment because the plan for risk was iterative development, mid-development switch - with lots of blame on employees when things went wrong) - and on multiple projects at the same time. - Blames employees rather than situations, even when management or budgets set employees up for failure; demoralizes employees so they don't feel safe talking about these problems to those who can do anything and end up gossiping instead - Pressure on upper- and mid-management gets passed on to employees and management is almost forced to find scapegoats for failures; many of the good managers who don't pass on the pressure quit or "leave to spend more time with family" - Old technology and out-of-date business practices put technical employees at risk of career stagnation. If you work here too long, there is a real risk that you may damage your hire-ability due to the lack of opportunity to work with new technologies. - You really need a stash of money set aside in case you need to quit your job or in case you get fired, so you have the guts to say and do the right thing; or, you need amazing political acumen so you can CYA at all times. - Really weird, old-fashioned ideas about 'loyalty to the company', with no 'loyalty to the employee' in return. We were told not to say things like, "If an engineer moves on to a different company" to explain why we needed documentation, readable code, etc. - instead, we should use the "hit by a bus" example. Despite the high turnover, the company still liked us to pretend that the main reason people would be leaving was death. - I had health problems that improved dramatically within days after I quit working here. Working the long hours and caring about the job enough to let it affect my health was my choice, but I prefer to work at a company where I can care about my job without getting sick. - I was able to get 4 higher-paying offers with better benefits and more flexibility within two weeks of posting my resume on Dice, all within 10 blocks of the Seattle office. There's just too many other opportunities in Seattle for mid-to-senior level employees, with the hot start-up scene here. NRC could be a reasonable choice for a junior developer with a lot of ambition who can self-start well and can handle politics gracefully. Such a person could pick up a lot really fast by being prepared to take over when more senior devs get managed out, and then quit after 2 to 3 years to work somewhere better with a lot of relatively senior experience.