XiFin reviews about "upper management"

Upper and middle management are terrible. They manage by fear and deceitful, underhanded behavior. Management in the MDX department is particularly bad. It is tiring to see reviews on here saying how great the company is. These are obviously posted by management.

- Leadership is stuck in the past and resistant to change - Key decisions are often rushed to appease upper management rather than made strategically - Still reliant on a handful of outdated engineers and managers with little innovation - Lack of modern vision and slow adoption of current best practices

Upper management lacks in overall support

These are in no specific order: 1. Fetishization of processes: Every single thing you do at XIFIN has an absurd procedural overhead, and you will encounter an enormous amount of pushback for even the simplest of requests. At the same time however, the same process can (and will) vary wildly in execution from week to week. Entire departments will suddenly develop amnesia and deny that things were ever done differently; things you've never seen in the past will be thrust onto you as though you've always been responsible for them . This results in endless confusion on everyone's part, turning minor 15-minute tasks into week-long odysseys of doubt and uncertainty. 2. Outdated technology with nonexistent documentation: If you are the sort of person who likes to refer to the documentation when a question arises, you will be absolutely SOL here. XIFIN runs entirely on tribal knowledge, closely guarded by upper management out of fear that the employees might one day figure out how the software works. The documentation that does exist is sparse, and offers little beyond a high-level overview. Even the software itself offers incorrect descriptions of settings and configurations, and cannot be trusted. This does not stop anyone from expecting you to have a rock-solid understanding of the entire platform from day one, however, even for things wildly outside the scope of your position. Questions about even the most basic functionality end up being escalated all the way up the chain of command, and you will be softly scolded for not somehow knowing the answer. As a result, each department has radically different views on how XYZ is 'supposed' to work, and there are constant conflicts as a result. The technology itself appears frozen in time. There are regular 'updates' released that accomplish little more than ticking the box for meeting a biweekly release schedule. When a new feature is actually rolled out, it is such an unusual occurrence that it takes the company at least six months to adapt and incorporate the changes into existing processes. That, combined with the utter lack of good documentation, makes things far more difficult than they have any right to be. 3. Management: I have never worked somewhere before where upper management had such obvious disdain for their employees. The C-levels have been with the company since the early years, and refuse to relinquish any control over the day-to-day operations at XIFIN. As a result, there is a stagnant, unpleasant culture of distrust that permeates the entire company, trickling from the top down. You will be talked-over, ignored, and made to feel stupid on a regular basis. If a project is deemed sufficiently important, you will be micro-managed into the ground, as you are a rank-and-file employee who obviously cannot be trusted to manage anything themselves. This attitude taints the rest of the company, made evident by the endless contest of 'who can throw who under the bus first'. There are good managers here, who attempt to shield their employees from the brunt of it, but they are the minority. 4. COVID Response: In late March, XIFIN started transitioning employees to WFH. By early May, the CEO and upper management had already begun talking about having employees return to the office. This was conveyed through a series of mandatory weekly company meetings. While other tech companies in the area have postponed returning to the office through the end of the year, XIFIN apparently does not trust its employees to work remotely. To their credit, XIFIN did partner with a laboratory to provide COVID testing for all employees. This would be great, were it not for the fact that this testing didn't take place until two weeks after bringing people back into the office. I am not clear on why the company decided to potentially expose dozens of employees, rather than waiting until after testing had been completed.

Pay for amount of worked that is being asked. The pay is way below industry standard.

a lot of blame culture trickled down from upper management

Some of the negative review are a bit unfair. I mean, the company did hire you, didn't they? There are also some "positive" reviews which seem a bit too good to be true. The company has limited resources, aging technology and subject to regulatory oversight due to Protected Health Information. The upper management team is protective of proprietary code and knowledge, which is fine, but get ready for intense roadblocks, micro-managing and the demoralizing process of filling out timecards. Getting anything accomplished is a tedious, miserable and artery -hardening process. My advice is to take the easiest and most noticeable projects because, this is a cloud service company working with Protected Health Information, which means processes, requirements gathering, decision making move at a relatively slow pace with a lot of paranoid second guessing. Be prepared for gaps in administrative/technical processes due to employee turnover. Additional duties will be dropped in your lap and you will become “noticeable” for all the wrong reasons. In order to keep up, you will put in extra hours which decreases the “pay to quality of life ratio”. You will deal with burnout, frustration. At the worst point of the process there will be meetings as to why you and your department are “running behind”, so get ready to bite your tongue and take it, because there will be an HR Rep there to squelch any honest feedback. Hey, if you need a paycheck, then take the job, but look at it as a “temporary gig”. Does this make it different from most other companies this size? Not really, but the workplace culture has a lot of room to improve.