NIC Reviews

I have worked at multiple NIC state portals and this one is by far the most unprofessional and ill-prepared. Amazingly high turnover. Within only 3 years there have been 4 General Managers, 3 Director of Operations (maybe 4, they kept changing the title) 2 Directors of Technology, 2 Creative Directors, 2 Directors of Project management, and had an almost entire staff replacement. They even removed the entire Quality Assurance staff which tells you what they think of quality. Basically, your chances of lasting there over two years is about 35%.Their project mangers are useless. No yime management or actual deadlines established within any sense of reality. This causes the staff to work multiple hours of overtime that goes unpaid. The developers never get the credit but the awful PM who caused this disaster gets promoted for driving dev/design staff to the edge instead of doing their jobs and planning the project properly.

This isn't complaint review, but the problems I've seen over the past few years gotten much worse with the new Sr. management about a year ago. I guess experiences vary per NIC location but our Madison office is a mess. We hear Sr. Management preaching about "root cause," They are the root cause. Big time micromanagement, total lack of trust with employees, intimidation, definitely in the gray area with practices and sharing information to "partners", not transparent and truthful to employees and partners, Sr. managers throwing employees & middle managers under the bus to cover their own tail and middle managers have zero decision making authority. Everything has to be run through the top of the pyramid. You own the problem and will be penalized for problems, but Sr. management often creates the problems because they won't let people do their jobs and don't trust employees or partners. Big bureaucracy and hierarchy for an office of less than 40 staff. More managers were added. Almost 1/2 the staff are "managers" but they basically create documentation and follow poorly defined "process" that shift with the GM. Our portal is BIG on process and documenting to the point where it is crippling. Not agile like they pretend to be. There is more process than in a large corporation. There are some very negative and unprofessional people who have been there a long time, but they are protected by the Sr. management no matter what these negative employees seem to do to others. I see Sr managers have lots of closed door meetings, private calendar meetings, secrecy with partners and they are "documenting". One rule you learn right away, if you aren't at your desk, you aren't working. This is not a positive place to work and we are worried. There are many talented people who are on their way out because of the Sr. management, but Sr. management will just say they were bad apples anyway or they say things "every organization has problems".