I've been dancing around leaving this review for a while now, mostly because I didn't know what I wanted to say or how to say it. Put simply, my experience at athenahealth was absolutely terrible. I'll throw out the disclaimer that I had a horrible manager, which can make all the difference. Athena is a very successful company, and with that, they've been growing immensely. The problem is, as they've continued to grow, they're promoting people to managerial positions who a) have no real interest in being a manager (only accepting the jobs because they think it's the only way to move up), and b) have no experience managing people. You can be an absolute rockstar at your job, but managing people is an entirely different skill set. Unfortunately, I had one of those managers. To make it worse, she was verbally abusive, discouraging, and didn't trust anyone except for herself. Working for her was a total nightmare.
Eventually I ended up speaking to HR about her (first time I ever did that in a company) and to my surprise, they weren't able to do anything! My department's HR rep. flat out told me that I wasn't the first to file this complain with her, but there was so much red tape in making a change that they weren't going to be able to do anything about it. Unfortunately, I've heard similar stories about other managers there as well.
In the end, I know a lot of people love working there and I'm sure with the right manager and right team it really is a fun place to work. But from my experience and from what I've heard from other friends who worked there, there are just too many departments that are mismanaged take advantage of their employees.
