Vista Projects Reviews

Only Con I can think of (a serious one) in my humble opinion is regarding their much touted "ownership program", a model I think can either propel Vista to new heights or, if mis-managed, eventually bring about Vista's demise in the long term. Vista boasts the fact that their senior employees are owners and hence they have a very unique model in the industry. Which is true, if the program was run TRANSPARENTLYL. From the outside, this marketing gimmick looks pretty good. But once in, you realise this shareholder program is no better than the Autocratic Patrionizing systems of the Middle East. They do not have an official (public for all to see) criteria on how shareholders are selected. They claim it is based on long term service. Yet, some of them became shareholders in a few years, and other very derserving long term employees languish on the sidelines. Vista says there is an additional criteria of "substantial contribution to the success of Vista Projects". Yet, some of the shareholders (such as the ones in Process or IT) are young folks with no "substantial contribution". I can very confidently say other regular employees have much more of a proven track record of successful contributions to the company than these folks. Ask anyone in the company, and almost 98% of the regular employees will tell you they do not see these specific young shareholders as instrumental to the success of Vista. They have not contributed much except in the way of maybe good social relations with one or two of the founding owners. What this does is gives a feeling to the rest of the workforce, that if you can get on the good side of the existing shareholders (socially) you have a chance of becoming an owner yourself, even if there are 10 others within the company that have longer service records with Vista and have obviously made tremendous contributions to the success of the company. It feels more like a mafia type organization with your ownership chances based on who you know in the company.

Starting on last quarter of 2013, several changes on Company structure and management downgraded the quality of the decisions, the attitude towards the employees and the due professional respect in regards project execution. Department Managers were eliminated, but the new decision making structure substituting the old system was not explained/made clear to the employees, perhaps because the experiment itself was still unclear and in-progress. As a result of all of these, the perception of the professionals working for VISTA regarding their future and career development suddenly became unclear, and this fact along with the downgrading relationship of Company Management with one of the Company´s main Clients, has encouraged some good engineers to leave the Company, and then the once wonderful work environment nearly vanished. The assets of this type of companies are their good professional engineers, hence it is essential for them to create a good team and to keep it. Lately, low opportunities for training and unclear career planning since the Departmental Managers were in fact eliminated. Another issue: interdisciplinary communication had never been appropriated, but lately was becoming less and less effective.