Politics and mediocrity abound here. - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso Hexagon

This company is large and has two major divisions plus some acquired companies under its name. The PP&M group seems to make money and do well, and the people who work in that group seem happy. However, I worked for a small company based in the Atlanta area, ERDAS, that was acquired by Intergraph and under the Intergraph SG&I group, but still mostly functioned as an autonomous entity. My negative experiences were primarily due to the company I started out with, so this review is really about it and the Atlanta division of Intergraph that it became. My issue with Intergraph SG&I is that they were resting on the laurels of past achievement and didn't seem aggressive enough about moving forward, and that they didn't root out and eliminate the people in the organization who were playing social politics instead of just doing their best work. The company I started out with was terrible to work for before the merger. Sometimes people could get ahead by being good at their jobs, but the easiest way to get along was to kiss up to the managers, whose large egos made them particularly susceptible to that kind of thing. I had two different managers during my time there. I had bad experiences with both of them because they'd been promoted on the basis of their personal relationships with higher managers and not because of their skills. Both seemed insecure because of their lack of skills and rather than support the efforts of motivated direct reports, did their best to thwart them. The entire environment favored mediocrity, so that's what thrived there. I could tell as soon as I got there that there was some kind of infighting between my manager and some other managers, and I had landed in the middle of it. As a result, he didn't introduce me to the group I'd be working with, or even set up a workstation for me. There were no resources at the company with which I could train myself, so I mostly had to read materials from one of our main competitors to learn how the software worked and the science behind it. They also had me in a position where I had to answer to multiple managers who could have impacted my job, some of whom had very different, often conflicting ideas about what I should be doing. My observation is that I wasn't the only person torn between multiple managers or different sets of expectations. The multiple manager thing is stressful, and you can't win no matter how hard you try. I finally transferred out of that group and into a group I thought was better. The manager there had actually been promoted beyond his capabilities and with little work or management experience because he was quite adept as a yes-man and stroker of management egos. Because that's how he'd built his career, he expected it from the people who worked under and alongside him, and could be very nasty to people who didn't fall in with his self-serving expectations. As a result, we had some people who coasted and worked only at staying on his good side. Some of us just worked, and ended up not only having to pull our own weight, but also that of the coasters. He put increasingly more pressure on the few good people to do more and more, and work more overtime to camouflage his inadequacy and that of his cronies. I did the best I could with it, and the people at Intergraph liked my work. I think he found that threatening, so I eventually got put on one of the routine layoff lists. After the merger, some things got worse, because Intergraph benefits are just not that great and were kind of step down. They also had their own internal political problems and had been subjected to fairly frequent and pretty large layoffs. A lot of the worsening, though, was because the management at my company kept doing sneaky, passive aggressive things to try to hold on to the positions and power they'd had prior to the merger. Right off, it seemed like Intergraph SG&I were putting their thumb on us and trying to be difficult to deal with. After I got to spend more time around the Intergraph people, I saw that wasn't the case and liked working with them better than the people in my own group. I found them to be more professional, skilled, and pleasant to work with. Their managers were also more skilled and were willing to help you. It started dawning on me that the initial sketchy impression of them came largely from managers at my company setting themselves up as the primary, and often sole communication conduit between us and the Intergraph people and spinning things to make themselves look best to whichever side they were talking to. When anything negative went down, we were told it was because of the Intergraph people. I don't know for sure, but I imagine the Intergraph people got an earful about how awful and inept we were, too. It was one of the most self-serving, unprofessional things I have ever seen on a job. I wish I had seen through it sooner so I could have just quit. Overall, I had an extremely poor experience working in this former ERDAS, Intergraph division. I wish the Intergraph and Intergraph SG&I brass had seen through the shenanigans of the division management and gotten rid of them so the whole company could move ahead. It didn't happen while I was there, though, and I doubt it's happened since. My advice is to stay away from this company, especially if the position is based out of that Atlanta office. Your nerves and career path will be better off.