Need to respect customers and employees before both are driven away
Pros
Our coworkers are mostly intelligent, motivated, hard-working and overall great to work with. Work/life balance is typically good under most circumstances, with limited "crunch times".
Cons
Management decisions seem to be short-sighted and made with little to no input from those the decisions affect. On top of that, often the same decisions are reversed, leading to confusion and an impression that management doesn't really know what they are doing. The middle managers I have interacted with either don't have the guts to stand up to upper management or legitimately have no authority to make decisions and upper management seem to be unwilling to back them when they try to make decisions, with the typical reason given being "lack of budget". Salaries are below market averages across all positions, insurance rates are high and keep rising, and raises are typically marginally below inflation unless you have a habit of kissing up to the correct managers (not always your own). Developers, have been leaving in droves over the past 6-9 months and almost none are being replaced. Most remaining developers have either been with the company for 3 years or less, or nearly a decade or more, with few in between. With so many leaving and the amount of "tribal" knowledge that exists in the company with little to no documentation on most topics, there are chunks of information simply cease to exist as people walk out the door. Many other departments are shrinking as well, with the only department that continues to grow being sales. Customers are treated as cash cows to be milked for every penny. Most major problems in our software remain until someone can find a customer that is impacted enough that they are willing to pay to fix it. Until then, we often do nothing because of a lack of resources, and if we fix it to improve software quality, we can't charge any customer for the work performed. Overall, pride in our software is relatively low and seems to be getting worse as our core product offerings age ungracefully. According to surveys, our customers at best dislike us and our software, with the primary reason cited being our employees are inexperienced and/or don't know their systems. They feel like they are always speaking to someone new every few months and have to re-train our employees on the specifics of their system, and so have an understandable lack of faith in our abilities. With so many developers leaving and so much analyst turnover, their concerns are more well-founded than they know.
