Pros
They hire a ton of new grads, which I was, so we all partied together and had a good time outside of work.
Cons
Where to start? The pay is HORRIBLE, especially for what you have to put up with A promotion is only something they give out if you are willing to do more work for the same pay, congratulations. People are constantly coming and going through the company. Many are straight up fired for being just terrible at their job. Many more are fired simply because somebody in upper management decided he doesn't like them anymore. Work from home? Forget it. Flex time? You are welcome to come in anytime before 8am and leave anytime after 5pm. A gentleman I worked with was taking evening classes trying to earn a graduate degree. Because of traffic and the location of the school from the office this gentleman needed to leave work at 4:30 two days a week for one semester. He asked his manager if it would be OK for him to come in early those days so that he may leave early. The answer he got was NO. Not only that, but he was also told that OSI's PTO policy states that you can only take PTO in 1 hour increments, so this poor gentleman had to take at least 2 hours of PTO each week because he needed to leave at 4:30. Upper management will walk around to make sure you are in your desk between the hours of 8-5. One day at 4:50pm some of the managers were running around the office telling select people there was an emergency meeting. Only about 20% of the company was "invited" to the meeting. While the meeting was going on, the same managers were new running around unplugging the network cables from those employee's PC's. The "emergency meeting" that happened during the last 10 minutes of the week was to inform them that they were no longer employees. Bahman, the CEO, was actually supposed to be the bearer of bad news. He chickened out and had the HR lady do it for him instead. He left the office before the meeting was over. The following week there was a company meeting held to give the current employees an explanation of what was going on. During that meeting we were all informed that there was going to be another round of layoffs in two weeks so we should all be on our best behavior and prove yourself. Sure enough, two weeks later, they let go another 10-20% of the company. This time, instead of holding an emergency meeting at the end of the day on Friday, they waited until everyone went home Friday evening, and around 6:30pm they started calling employees at their home to inform them they no longer work for the company and that a time had been scheduled the following week for them to come and pick up their severance. I believe this has changed since I was there, but they only did payroll once a month. Yep, you read that right, one paycheck a month. Oh, and when you start, you didn't get your first paycheck until you've completed 30 days of employment, so, depending on where in the month you started, you could go 2 months before you see that first check....and my first one came late. I had to call HR and bring it to their attention that after approximately 6 weeks of employment I hadn't received any money. When I was hired I was negotiating a higher salary. I was told by HR that I would receive a review after 6 months and as long as things were going well, I would be brought up to a more competitive salary. I never received that 6 month review. In fact, my annual review came 6 months late. I received a raise of next to nothing, but the best part is this: To justify my next to nothing raise, the VP pulled out a sheet of paper that had itemized all of the financials that pertain to me. Things like my salary and a list of taxes the company is required to pay to have my as an employee, i.e., social security tax. He totaled this all up and said: This is the real amount we pay for you, so we feel like your compensation is in line with the market. Not long before I moved on, I was sitting at my desk updating my resume to send off to a job application. Some lady suspected I was not working on work stuff so she told her manager on me (yes, a grown adult tattled on my). Even better, her manager (who is now one of the VPs), snuck around the cubicles and jumped out from behind in hopes to catch me! I actually started laughing, I thought it was joke....but it wasn't....he was pissed. I could ramble on with a dozen horror stories like this, but I'll stop there. To sum up, working at OSI was so bad that I had actually contemplated leaving the software development field all together, but thankfully OSI is a one of a kind crappy place and not at all representative of any other company anywhere.
