Awesome - Recensione dipendente - Senior Software Engineer presso ATA

You can work remotely from home.

Smaller company with limited open positions.

- Management will create no problems for you - You can sit here as long as you want/need - Easy to manage expectations to avoid excessive claims on personal time

- Cheaper than cheap. Most everything they claim to have is a veneer. Consistently had less substance behind claims than I realized was possible. - Management will not fix any problems - Lots of effort and ridiculous sums of executive's time put into maintaining worthless processes that they think put them in league with the big boys - maybe if they'd been done well. But as-is, it's just an amazing exhibition of how much time can be wasted. VERY policy document heavy. - They run this like a landlord maintains an apartment: if the dollar can be saved, they will. If it isn't broken (as in if LLC payouts to the CEO / CFO aren't stopped because of it), it likely won't be fixed. - Almost everything Craig tells you is fake. He is a very good salesman first few interactions, but it's all pretend. Exaggeration added upon exageration and "leadership" in the sense of blithe claims to a make-believe-world, and it's not often clear what initial truth is even behind the world as he sees it. - I've never seen such a stark disconnection between leadership and front-line engineers. Being a 3-level company (CEO, "leadership team", engineers) this is even more ridiculous. - The leadership sees themselves as the brass, and all the engineers as the enlisted. If you say everything is awesome, good job for agreeing. You get it. If you have any less than positive feedback (can just be about risks to contract, not even about the company) it's all just "grumbling" to the CEO's ears. - Another way to put this is that you're forever 21 here, unless you're over 45. I've never been so degraded as a professional as I was here. They DO NOT see their employees as equals. Perhaps ATA is a family - if so, the CFO and CEO are the parents, and the leadership team is the kids. Individual contributors are the foster kids. - They have rankly dishonest VPs, and the CEO is hardly someone it's safe to be honest with. He can't engage with contrary views. He can re-assert his view, claim to be fine disagreeing, and then go to yelling next time. He isn't able to coherently engage opposing positions. - We have a lead engineer in the hospital for at least 8 weeks due to the stress of trying to make stuff work despite zero support from above. Again - no problems you bring up are real. It's just "grumblings". In general, as an engineer of much value here, you may first try to fix things, seeing super obvious improvements. You'll find they absolutely do not trust anyone outside the leadership group, insist on tying themselves up in absurd knots passing stuff around processes where there are more committees the leadership team is on than there are leaders, and just generally making progress impossible. You're also funding the lifestyles (fairly lavish ones at that) of people notably less intelligent and capable than you are. There are other companies that will give you far more in return for what they take. You are only here to help them make some money. If you can echo that it's still a family that's great, but 98% of the employees are silent in all calls, because there's no reason to talk. They constantly min-max policies btw against the employees, and w/o regard for employment law. I could list off a handful of violations. They don't care. ATA is what would happen if your typical landlord took over a small defense LLC. NOTE: ATA is not what it was. Many of the people who made it what it was have left. It's not what it used to be. Leadership is uniquely without any credibility in front of the engineers. They've become such an absurdity there is no help for them, but to let the leadership keep running on the "we're awesome" road and not getting in the way. Oh! Craig will always low-ball you in interviews. Don't let him. It's not him that pays the cost anyway. He actually makes a percentage of your rate (generally) so higher pay is better. But! underpaid talent is much easier on the PMs because the burn-down is so much slower. Every job is performed to such a bare minimum of a bare minimum (truly, they do less in critical roles than I ever realized you could and still survive). As an employee, you are certainly exposed to excessive liability. Their policies are written overtly to protect themselves, not you. You don't get clear instructions. You're "liable" to have read 500 pages of policy documents, some of which, you don't even have access to. Managers are completely fake also. One of the pretend processes. They live in a reality formed by policy. Policy exists, so the thing exists. Now off to another committee meeting.