Cool projects, poor management - werkgeversreview Anonieme werknemer bij Space Micro

-- Terrible management -- This company went through a fast growth period about 2 years ago, which is when I started. There was little to no direction or organization, which could have been attributed to growing pains of a small company, but it never got better. The whole time I was there it was generally chaos. Nobody knew what anybody else was doing. Communication was almost non-existent. There would be last-minute scrambles to meet deadlines, and management didn't seem to understand why. They would just put more pressure on the engineers to "ship that box!" without trying to understand what was actually holding up the process. In addition, they would often have engineers doing jobs that didn't really make sense for them to be doing. I knew a software engineer who was being asked to write a link budget, which is an RF engineer's job. All functional testing had to be performed by engineers, not techs. So when overnight environmental testing was performed, there were engineers that had to sit and stare just to make sure the test was going alright. The CEO, though he seems to be a nice enough guy, is a bit like a naive, clueless grandpa. He seems to spend his time sending happy-go-lucky emails about all the wonderful things going on in the company and walking around occasionally just to see what everyone is doing. The funny thing about the latter of those two things is that he investigates what others are doing on a very surface level. I know people that he walked up to, started a friendly conversation about what the they were working on, then would abruptly turn around an walk away in the middle of their explanation because things were apparently getting too technical. No goodbye, no "sorry, I've gotta go do something else". His smile just vanished and he turned around and stalked off.... I mean, what the heck? To me, this is a perfect characterization of management. They're interested only in having a shallow understanding of what is actually going on with development, and they tap out when things get hard. -- Poor physical working conditions -- When I first started working there, the building had become a bit too small given the rapid growth. Then they laid off about 10 people and there was enough room, but management decided to move to an "open office" type layout. Instead of having everyone being organized by department (software, electrical, mechanical, etc.) they moved to being organized by groups. That was a good idea, in my opinion. However, that resulted in some groups being crammed into small areas of the building. On top of that, one of the biggest areas of the building had its cube walls torn down, and the poor people that were assigned to sit there had to sit in a mostly empty open room that people constantly walked through to get to the back of the building. It ended up being a bunch of wasted space. Besides the space issues, the building is old and dirty. The company only seems to pay to clean the bathrooms, sweep the hallway floors, and empty the garbage cans. Things like cleaning the fridges, microwaves, and common tables were not done. I heard of a comical story of one engineer who had been there for years who did an experiment. He wiped down one small section of one of the fridges, then waited a year. A year later, that small section was slightly cleaner than the rest of the fridge. It had not been cleaned for that entire year. It still has not been cleaned. -- Unrealistic deadlines -- This is in part due to the poor communication at the company, but things are done last minute far, far too often. I would often be handed a task the day something was due. A tremendous amount of pressure would be put on me to get this thing done. I feel that this was unfair, because if I can't get this thing done in this crazy short amount of time, then it makes it look like *I* was the reason the project saw a delay. When really, it was management's fault for not getting organized and communicating to people what needs to be done and when.