Soar Tech reviews

Management. It's a bad sign when an AI company that can trace itself back to seminal AI researchers can't capitalize on the AI/ML boom over the last decade. In fact, they have to lay off staff just about every year due to poor planning/budget management. It's a sad sign when the company drops the amount of IRAD it can invest yearly despite growing in size to support larger and larger upper management overhead costs. Lip service is paid to Culture & Values. The words are nice, but the actions never matched them.

Like all the other recent reviews on here, it's management - plain and simple. While most people at SoarTech are delightful, the behavior of the higher-ups at times borders on villainous. That may seem hyperbolic, but that's really how it feels to work here at times. - The annual mass layoffs are no joke. Regardless of how good or important you think your role might be, the anxiety that you're going to get laid off at any moment is constant and demoralizing. There's always a promise of "this round of layoffs will fix the problem for good" and it's never true. - SoarTech's COVID policies at the different stages of the pandemic were very smart and safe, but only on paper. The higher-ups had weekly, catered, in-person meetings, with no masks, throughout the pandemic. The Orlando office barely followed the policies at all, and a lot of people there got COVID as a result. At least one person was even threatened with being fired if they tried to enforce the mask wearing policies in the office, despite it technically being their job to do so. Threatened, of course, by the same group who wrote the policies. - During the last round of performance reviews, apparently too many people did well, which meant they were set to get better raises and bonuses. So management told the supervisors to knock some people's scores down a full point (out of 5), with no explanation, so they wouldn't have to give people the money they earned. - Related to the last point, there's basically no incentive to do any more than the bare minimum to not get fired. If you work incredibly hard for a full year, and get a great review score, you'll at most get a 1-2% extra raise compared to the bare minimum. Promotions are handed out with no correlation to performance, so there's no incentive there either. But even if you do get promoted, you're looking at a ~5-10% raise for a drastic increase in responsibilities, depending on the role - ...that is, of course, except for the highest ranking people at the company, who nearly every year manage to create a brand new position to promote one of them to so they have an excuse to get even bigger raises. This happens the same years that the company has mass layoffs and low raises, and management seems disinterested in acknowledging a correlation between these. - Money in general is abysmally handled. A request for the company to purchase a helpful software license in the realm of several hundred dollars per year often spawned the creation of a "discussion group", where 10+ people would collectively spend several thousands of dollars in salary hours discussing whether or not it would be a good idea to purchase the software. And the answer from management always wound up being "no" anyway. This theme of stinginess for important things, and wastefulness on unimportant things, is frequent throughout the company. And honestly, I could just keep going. The best way to enjoy working at SoarTech is to plug your ears, do the bare minimum, take your paycheck, and leave before you get laid off. If you're inclined to care at all about the nature of the work you're doing, or the larger-scale business decisions being made, you're going to have a bad time. Management is showing no signs of changing the course they're on any time soon.