Netgain Reviews

After the company was sold to an investment firm, the original owner/president was replaced with a CEO who single-mindedly focuses on revenue-on-paper instead of running a profitable company. He has hired on a handful of C-levels and VPs from external candidates, injecting a whole new layer of management/bureaucracy into the organization. The company spends irresponsibly on perquisites for new C-level/VPs/Sales Executives. Primary among these is a new executive office in Minnetonka, separate from the existing Field Service office in Minneapolis. There are numerous other examples employees are aware of, but could be considered confidential and are excluded from this review. These costs are, of course, in addition to the salaries of several new C-levels/VPs. Employees are treated as disposable. The CEO has callously suggested entire technical teams are replaceable. Leadership even implemented a layoff and hired on contract workers. (This is in direct contrast with how the company used to be managed, where "respect for individuals" was a genuine value of the previous leaders.) As a result of leadership's disregard, there's been significant turnover within the organization. Meanwhile, leadership has been ignoring the obvious operational issues associated with onboarding new employees to replace long-term hires that have left. Due to the emphasis on new revenue and the intentional and unintentional reduction in headcount, there is very poor work/life balance for technical/operational employees. For salaried employees, there's no policy or mechanism to collect extra hours worked (compensatory time) and rarely a good time to use accrued PTO. Many employees sit at the PTO cap and feel unable to utilize their accrued PTO. Netgain's C-suite has also acquired two other cloud hosting organizations recently. One acquisition was conducted prior to performing any in-depth review of existing technical operations. The result has been large amounts of Netgain effort spent performing break-fixes on unfamiliar infrastructure without any ability to realize revenue for that time. HR seems overly concerned about relocating staff between different offices or cubicles and strictly less concerned about the general wellbeing and development of competent, productive employees. The list goes on... sadly.

* Overworked and underpaid. * Standards have gone by the wayside. * Massive disconnect between leadership and technicians (leadership does not understand what the techs do). * ZERO work life balance. They recently laid off a number of staff (from an already thinning herd). We are now struggling to keep up with our day to day work, let alone all of the break fixes and special requests from clients. There is no plan for employee retention. None. It is almost like they want the remaining team to leave so they can show profit in the books and sell the company. Management does not understand what the downstream teams do. All they know is that "it gets done". They also don't want to understand what we do, or how we do it. They are under the impression that whatever that may be, is old, archaic and it can be updated. So they hired a group of engineers to a new DevOps team recently, with the vision of automating what we do. However, that team has started from the ground up, revamping how everything is done. How servers are built, how applications are installed. Management is counting on this DevOps team's work to be the magic bullet that will fix it all. It is great that they are doing that and introducing new technologies, but we will not see an impact of that work anytime in the near future - it will be 6 to 8 months (at least) before anything comes to light. The plan until such time is... just fix it. We have no subject matter experts anymore. They all left. We have L1 technicians troubleshooting senior engineer issues. It is taking weeks to resolve issues, all the while the clients are complaining. To make matters worse, they have not replaced any of the staff that left. There is no action plan to fill the gap when a resignation is received. The plan is "let's add what they did to someone else's plate". They just keep piling on more and more work on to the remaining techs. They recently posted a few positions, but that doesn't even account for 1% of the lost staff. There is also no effort to retain the remaining talent. None. 10-12 hours work days are normal. Weekends? Just another work day for most of us. We are answering emails and messages at all hours of the day. The staff are exhausted. They are tired. The quality of work is dropping. Fast. Clients are starting notice the change in quality. It is taking longer to resolve simple issues. Basic technical tasks are getting skipped, in favor of the latest fire that needs to be put out.