TCP Software Reviews

It's been a year since I left and I still get frustrated thinking about how awful my experience was working here. I've only put this review off so long because I've moved on and don't enjoy recalling this miserable period of my life. I really don't expect anyone to read this whole thing, it's mostly just a petty catharsis for me. Going back all the way, there were red flags before I even started. I was called a few weeks after my application and asked if I was still interested in interviewing for a Support Technician position, despite applying for a programming position. During the application process, I was asked how much I made at previous jobs, only for them to offer me less. When I emailed back asking if it was negotiable, they immediately raised it to above what I was making before with no discussion. Right from the get-go, training was a mess. I started the week of Labor Day and somehow this wasn't accounted for, so near the end of the two weeks of initial product training the instructors started panicking that we wouldn't be able to finish in time and rushed through the end of it. Despite being hired for a technical role, I had to not only had to go through a month of product training, but three months of working regular support. During that time, I was expected to fulfill all the duties of a support technician without receiving any of the benefits. - My favorite example of this was when they wheeled a cart of second monitors in to reward the support techs who were doing well (because for some reason getting a second monitor was considered a luxury instead of a standard to make work easier). They gave one to everyone in my section but didn't give one to me because I technically wasn't a support technician, even though I wasn't allowed to do my real job yet. - On the rare occasion that a support technician had to make a sale, they would receive some small commission for it. Similarly to the monitors, I received no such commission as I wasn't actually a support tech. After finally actually moving to my position, it still took several months for me to get a second monitor. Most of our work was done by remoting into servers and was incredibly inconvenient to do on a single monitor. They had 45-hour workweeks at lower hourly rates for no reason other than to milk as much of your time as possible. Plus update nights several nights a month. Many people there treated it like a clan. Some higher-ups unironically used the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" to describe how you should dedicate yourself to the company. You got a whopping 2 days of vacation for the first year. No 401k matching (and it never came to be in my time here) Pay was well below industry standard, and they would constantly justify it by saying you were making enough for the cost of living of San Angelo. One of the executives owned a private plane, but they "couldn't afford" to pay any employees reasonably. We had to attend a mandatory New Year meeting on a Saturday where we spent about 4 hours talking about how great the company was. Wasn't even worth the free meal. I made the mistake of working hard and becoming well-known as one of the only people who would actually help when there were issues. I was rewarded with a leadership role I really didn't want, but the company essentially refused to give raises or cost of living adjustments unless they came with a promotion (and additional responsibilities). Most of the tickets we received were to pull application logs for Support since they didn't have access to the servers. Initially, the app logs contained PII so we couldn't even share what they actually needed. To give some credit, this was eventually changed to contain no PII. I feel like this shouldn't be something you should have to complain about at a multimillion-dollar company, but the bathroom situation was a disaster that took way too long to fix. - The men's bathrooms combined had four stalls for a company of over three hundred people, so unless you got lucky you would end up queueing in the bathroom and just wasting time. - Their first attempt to relieve this was to add three more urinals, which perfectly demonstrates how little any upper management listens to or understands problems reported by employees. There was almost no documentation for any of our procedures. Employees were encouraged to fill out the Great Place to Work survey. I never witnessed it first-hand but heard rumors of people submitting multiple surveys in exchange for gift cards and other prizes. After the first promotion, I still did the vast majority of the work. Tickets were constantly ignored by other techs because they knew I wouldn't just let them sit there. Vacations were often followed by a 12-hour workday spent trying to fix everything that went wrong while I was gone. The company was bought out by a private equity firm. This was admittedly a good thing at first as they worked to improve things such as benefits and long workweeks, though this was over the course of the next couple years. Almost everyone switched to remote work for COVID. This was nice while it lasted. Eventually discovered (pretty sure it was sent to me by mistake) that one of my reports made the same hourly wage as me, despite having less responsibilities and nobody reporting to them. The justification (excuse) for this was that they lived in Austin so they had a higher cost of living. So higher-ups used the "cost of living" excuse to both pay some people less and people in other cities more. After the buyout, we started having all-hands meetings where 90% of the meeting was just discussing finances and sales. Upper management conducted layoffs in May 2020. - This occurred in the middle of hiring about a dozen C-level executives. When asked about this in an all-hands meeting, the question was dodged and discarded. - These layoffs were not due to financial need, but prospective financial need (even though we were in the middle of a pandemic and nobody could predict what could happen in the next few months). - This only created more work for everyone else and got rid of the people who actually knew how to do specialized things. - There were rumors of the classic case of offering people their own job back for less pay. I learned how a specific adapter worked and learned a lot about IIS servers because nobody else would bother doing it. Everyone was in the habit of just ignoring the ticket or asking Development to fix it even if the issue was server-side. Wrote extensive documentation for the adapter, including troubleshooting, running it manually, and updating it, but nobody wanted to learn anything. Hardly any documentation for any processes. Any that did exist was written by me and nobody else would ever bother updating it (or even following it in many cases). The director of our department left; they replaced him with the an interim director, but he also left a few months later. We didn't get a new one for nearly a year. Once again, instead of just giving me a raise I was promoted to a manager position when I would have rather had a better-paying technical one. They finally got us off 45-hour workweeks but made us salaried so overtime ceased to exist when we still had to work over 40. Our servers would constantly end up on an email blacklist which would prevent automated emails from our application from sending. The only way to fix this was to manually request removal and wait for it to be removed. Despite constantly receiving customer complaints and Dev even identifying the root cause, this was never fixed while I worked here. One of my first tasks as a manager (being a first-time manager as well) was to make everyone come back from working from home, regardless of situation. - The justification for this was poor performance, but we effectively weren't tracking performance at all. The new task became "develop performance metrics so we can prove that everyone is performing poorly and demote or fire them." - My C-level manager found a Glassdoor review with legitimate complaints and tried to determine who it was so I could quietly demote/fire them. - This was when the stress began getting to me. I ended up primarily consulting Human Resources about this instead of my the C-level exec because they stubbornly insisted I make everyone come back and micromanage them. Was forced to give a writeup I disagreed with. This was the final straw and I tried to quit, but was talked into being moved into a different, more technical position. Finally got a new director who came in and insisted we waste even more time reading a stupid book. Our software had a memory leak that would cause the memory usage on all the servers to crawl up until the service crashes. Whoever was on call had to log in and reboot it in order to fix it (almost every night). Issues between departments wouldn't be resolved until you proved beyond any doubt that the issue was not your department's responsibility. Basically nobody would even try troubleshooting until you exhausted every tool at your disposal first. - The best example of this was when both I and someone else on our team went through extensive testing to prove that a DLL from another team was causing an issue. - That wasn't enough though, so we had to get on a meeting with our manager and two execs to screenshare and go through the exact same steps again to prove it was the DLL and get the other team to do something about it. The trademarked not-documenting-any-procedures was still going strong. Lo and behold they finally remodeled one of the bathrooms and added adequate toilets. As I was waiting to be moved into the new position, upper management decided it would be a good idea to apply several position changes throughout the department simultaneously and also give only about a week's notice. Like most things, this was handled very poorly. Once I moved into a non-manager position, I realized new management severely underestimated just how unhappy everyone at this company was. - Almost everyone in the department I moved to quit over the course of 3 - 4 months. All the work was pushed onto me because I appeared to know what I was doing. - I was on call almost all the time. - Several new team members were interviewed each week only for them to use TCP as leverage for better pay somewhere else (presumably because of what little pay TCP offered). - We ended up contracting out more team members to assist, but they had a hard time learning our overly complicated, arbitrary, proprietary, bad system. - They also had to use AWS workspaces to access our systems, which ran incredibly slow. The workdays preceding an update night ended up being a 6-hour screenshare trying to teach them the bare minimum of what they needed to know that night. Upper management was either completely clueless about the company-wide attrition or blamed it solely on the 2021 great resignation (or they were just lying and quietly firing people, which is even worse). We had a separate department for adapters between our software and others, but they weren't allowed to have access to the servers or really anything they needed. - Instead, they would reach out to us and have us screenshare which just used up more of our time so they could do their job. - We would give them control of the screenshare as well which totally defeated the purpose of restricting their access. Often we wouldn't be involved at all in troubleshooting the issue. - The only real reason they had restricted access is nobody who was left knew how to effectively set up the IAM roles. Software updates involved 6-hour periods of downtime once a month. If customers needed the software 24/7 this was a perfect excuse to sell them a clock with a rollback feature. Software updates were constantly delayed and often cancelled hours before due to new bugs being discovered (likely because almost the whole QA team quit as well). We had a weekly meeting with Security where they would have to pull teeth to get answers out of anyone for the status of issues. It often boiled down to: - "Hey install patches on these servers." - "We can't reboot their server until they update." - "When are they updating?" - "Who knows, it gets delayed an hour before updates every single time." Infrastructure was spread across way too many AWS accounts which made programming automations that much more difficult. Despite this position being months later, the memory leak still wasn't fixed. Since most of the Development team quit as well, they had to hire a contractor to try to identify the root cause. They eventually reduced the initial memory footprint when the application starts, but it would still inevitably max out and crash. After all the hoopla of trying to make everyone work in the office again, everyone pretty much silently agreed to just work from home and refuse to come in. Finally started making steps toward having good documentation by implementing Confluence, but ultimately I was expected to write all of it for my old and new positions. TCP acquired Humanity near the end of 2020 and hadn't integrated them by the time I left in August 2021. - The project leads from the involved departments changed several times as people walked out the door. Whatever the original plan was made no sense to anyone since the people who made it were long gone. - Instead of providing actual help with this major project, we were repeatedly reminded that this was just the first of many acquisitions and that more were coming down the road, so we need to figure this out. - Reaching out to any executives devolved into them just reasserting how important the integration was and providing zero help. Was constantly promised a bonus and not a raise, despite hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of salary walking out the door. The whole situation felt like a sinking ship that I was expected to salvage on my own. Any offerings of help, while appreciated, were from brand-new people who weren't familiar enough with the system. I left without a new job lined up and used going back to school as a resume filler just for the sake of leaving. Despite giving two weeks' notice nobody in the department knew I was leaving until the day of. HR congratulated me for leaving. Found out a while later my first manager was trying to subtly encourage me to leave and work somewhere better.