Overall, the primary issue with this company is with its management, this review aims to highlight specific problems with how this company is being run, and the impact of said problems on the employees.
1- No trust + Micromanagement
Managers don't trust their employees, which is results in constant micromanagement, and extremely strict policies.
Work from home and flexible working conditions were recently declared a thing of the past, their reasoning is that some people abuse the system, but instead of holding the abusers accountable, they instead remove any form of flexibility for everyone simply because they trust no one.
Your coffee and smoke breaks are monitored, and used against you, even if you're doing a good job, even if your performance is great, if you're not sitting on your chair, you're slacking off.
2- Extremely rigged salary/promotion scale
Wanna get promoted? Well good luck achieving all the near impossible things that you need to do in order to get promoted, this system was done to ensure that the least amount of people get any promotions or raises.
And even if you managed to meet all of these criteria, they can find a random excuse to not give you the raise you deserve because the criteria are vague, so it is very easy to invalidate all your hard work.
Also, people with similar "scores" on the scale seem to be getting inconsistent raises, so the whole system is a joke, because even your score doesn't mean you'll get a good raise.
3- Personal growth? No. Company growth? Yeaaaaaah
All of us work jobs in order to advance our careers, but not at Optimum, oh no way.
Basically, they have this system for asking employees to get certain certifications, sounds good on paper, right? Well, no, those certificates are picked by the company at random, you will likely get something that you're not interested in, and if you attempt to ask for something that you're interested in, you'll get the response: "These certificates are needed to achieve the company's goals."
So, basically, they don't care about your growth, only theirs.
Even better (or worse I guess), you didn't get those certificates? No raise for you, even if you were the star player in the whole company, so good luck trying to advance your career over here.
4- Bad business practices with clients
They hire fresh grads, throw them at clients telling those clients that they're getting experienced engineers (and even seniors in some cases!), they do this in order to get the largest amount of money possible from their clients, while paying their employees bare minimum. We are told to lie about our experience to cover up their lies. Just graduated from college? Well now you have to pretend you're a senior, no room for mistakes, no window to learn before you're thrown in the oven.
So, basically, they scam their clients.
Here's the good part, this has backfired on them horribly multiple times, a lot of clients were (understandably) upset with the performance of the "seniors" they were getting, which meant that the company started losing money instead of gaining money.
This explains why #2 and #3 above were implemented. and instead of trying to fix their business model, they blame their employees for these failures to meet client expectations.
Those new salary and certification systems were implemented after the company started losing clients in an attempt to limit their spending.
5- No job security
After the company started losing money because of their bad practices with clients, they of course blamed it on employees. And if you were unlucky enough to have a high salary, you had a good chance of being let go for no reason (well there is a reason actually, they want to cut costs), they'll of course tell you that you had bad performance and weren't meeting expectations, but it's a great coincidence that most of the people who were let either had high salaries or weren't assigned to a client, so basically weren't generating revenue.
Another approach they do sometimes is they mistreat employees with high salaries in order to get them to quit, this is of course done in order to avoid paying severance when laying them off.
All of this is done to tightly control their budget because of all the recent revenue losses, because "it's not our fault for sure, it's the employees'".
6- Favoritism
An extremely small percentage of employees is treated differently than others, it's as if all the rules doesn't apply to them, they are promoted even though they might not be fit, but just because they are liked by management.
7- No respect for personal time
Arrived a few minutes late? Prepare to get "the talk".
You live in another city? You're gonna have to wake up at 4 AM to arrive on time, because not only they own your 8 work hours, but they also own some of your personal time too.
If you ever need to stay late after your work hours to wrap something up (which will happen frequently), and you attempt to try to get something in return, you'll only get a "Thank you"
"What? Had to attend a meeting at 10 PM? Well, thank you for your contributions, anyway, don't be late tomorrow".
It's even one of the criteria for getting promoted, if you're not available after your working hours, you don't fit with the "company's culture", and they'll use that against you.
In their defense: there are exceptions in some cases, for example if you had to work an additional 4 hours or something like that. but overall, there is no respect for personal time.
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In conclusion, you're dealing with delusional, narcissistic management that lack the necessary skills for running a company.
All attempts to talk with management about any of these issues were met with closed ears.
Other cons that are not directly related to management.
8- Working hours
Given that most of the team works with US based clients, working hours are shifted to ensure overlap, which makes sense, but results in less personal time before and after work. Combine that with having to stay late sometimes and you basically have no free time to do anything after work
9- Office space
Air conditioning is always broken, office space is too cramped and too noisy, bad desks, bad chairs and bad laptops.
