Wonderful coworkers, interesting work, bad management
Pros
1. The people I worked with were wonderful, hard-working, caring people. My immediate managers genuinely cared about my successes, concerns, and general career path. I made great friends here, many of whom I stayed in touch with. 2. The work schedule is very flexible, and there is a good work-life balance. Some times of the year can get more busy depending on projects, but I was always encouraged to take time off after putting in more hours during a busier time. 3. Very competitive pay for the area 4. The work itself was very interesting to me. I’ve always worked in the military domain, and I loved the intersection of artificial intelligence and defense applications. I miss the work I did here, and one of the hardest parts about leaving was giving up the work and the people I worked with.
Cons
I left a year ago, and now that I have more experience at a better established company, I feel better qualified to identify what is going wrong at SoarTech. I loved the work I was doing and the people I worked with, and I was extremely disappointed that the company was so mismanaged at the top level that I had to look for other opportunities. SoarTech lacks a cohesive vision forward, so new avenues were often explored and abandoned, leading to massive layoffs with no notice. The company has failed to build a big enough contract base to support job security. I felt that I did not have control over what projects I worked on, and that made me fear that I would be fired every day I came to the office. I was moved on and off different projects constantly, and it didn’t seem like my specific skill set or interests were valued. Complaints and suggestions from employees seemed to fall on deaf ears of EMs, who only seemed concerned with constantly restructuring to support whatever contract was most important at the time. A lot of the concerns I raised were brushed off as “that’s just how this industry is”, but I came to SoarTech from a different defense contractor, and it was a very different experience. When I finally looked around and saw that the colleagues that had similar concerns as me had all left, I realized the company was not moving in the right direction.
