That said, the company itself needs an overhaul. Having read two of the more overly glowing reviews (and a comment made in response to a negative one), I suspect they might have been made by someone at management level; in fact, I suspect they're even higher than that - and therein lies the problem. EDSI seems to suffer from a systemic and crippling insecurity that starts right at the top. An inability to digest criticism in any form has translated into a stagnate company that can never seem to get ahead or even just out from under the crushing weight of ineptitude at the upper management level.
The company boasts moderate growth in the shadow of enormous loss, most recently with the dissolution of some of their oldest contracts and partnerships. These losses come under the seemingly overwhelmed and flaky leadership practices of regional managers that bring no new business and can only seem to offer obfuscation and bewilderment during those times of crisis when real leadership is needed. On top of this, there is oftentimes little remedy provided by the corporate office at an HR/leadership level. In fact, there is seemingly nothing but contempt for those who make good faith critiques of bad practices - these are employees who our soured upon as not being "positive" enough, as the company believes it can "positive" it's way out of anything.
Though the company boasts a multitude of "specialists," their purpose is often ambiguous and their product is apparently intangible. These specialists are bunched in with the company hierarchy, but what exactly they do for the branch offices with any kind of regularity is anyone's guess. It's not clear, at any given time, if they are part of HR or part of your office or part of some other special program, but they are equally deferred to and superseded by program directors - which, of course, is confusing as you are sometimes asked to do something by a specialist and countered by your director. What's more is that the known projects these specialists are working on - notably a conceptually simple skill-matching database, 7 plus years in the making - seem behind the times and tone-deaf to the real needs of our clients. Some of the programs they've been trying to develop, touted by the company as ground-breaking, are no different than software pioneered on college campuses over a decade ago.
If the poor communication between branch offices, specialists, and executive leadership wasn't enough, then what's worse is that staff from all three of these entities form the terrible idea known as the HR committee. This committee, made up of the understaffed HR department as well as regional managers and specialists, seems to rarely offer any kind of discernible or actionable resolution to any given problem. Some stuff is handled, some stuff is swept under the rug, some stuff isn't even acknowledged at all. This is certainly one of the more alarming concepts of this company - that management is actually PART of Human Resources, rather than subject to it. This sets up a dangerous precedent in which any dispute between an employee and a manager can rarely end in the favor of an employee, despite any truths or circumstances surrounding the situation. As a result, the company has high turnover at the basic employee level and can't seem to get rid of waste at the management level.
Maybe the most surprising revelation upon working for this company is the complacency displayed towards a terrible profit margin. It was revealed a few years ago at one of the company's "town hall meetings" - one of the company's better ideas in which executive leadership from the corporate office tour branch offices and field general questions - that EDSI's profit in any given year is well below what you would expect from a company that deals in big money government contracts. That revelation, combined with a bloated subsidiary consulting firm (that doesn't seem to net the company any business, another serious red flag) and the weight of a growing number of specialists who don't seem to be doing anything all that special make for an alarming company outlook that can leave one to wonder how long this company can stay in the black.
