glassdoor.com’s CCP Company Review

After college I wanted to live in a big city; I packed up, moved to Chicago, and started waiting tables in restaurants to help pay my rent. The University that I attended required that we graduate with some work experience and while out at a bar, a bartender friend introduced me to a manager at an IT Consulting company. I went on to have an interview, and then I started an entry-level help desk job.

I finished the program at the University while working full-time and eventually starting doing Level 1 support, then onsite support, and the helping out a team of IT technicians.

The company that I worked for was very much a start-up: brutal hours, strange and exhausting client requests, and a lot of similarities to the descriptions that I found for glassdoor.com’s review of CCP.

Pros

“onsite kitchen”
“laid back company”
“quite focused on the fun aspect of work”
“extremely smart and talented people”
“flexible environment”
“it is a wonderful place to be. But it is not a place to work for long”
“allows its employees to take independent initiative on many projects”
“camaraderie and sense of family is truly amazing”

Cons

“at times required, to do night and weekend hours in addition to normal working hours, without any compensation or time off guaranteed”
“often management is unwilling to participate in a thorough communications”
“Communication and knowledge sharing is a disaster”
“no documentation for older areas of development”
“struggles severely with internal and external communications”
“sticking a few php for dummies books in the games room really just is not corporate training”

The repeated comments about documentation and communication stand out as huge red flag for me. We had around 20 clients, 100-150 active issues at any given time, and projects rolling out constantly.

The majority of our communication was reactive and not proactive. When an email server was going to be rebuilt, sometimes clients would not know the extend of the downtime, service migration steps, or even final cost. The lack of clear communication before hand ended up hindering our client’s trust in the end.

Post Incarna, with a community that is flaring up with criticism and doubt, I hope that we see some solid, direct, and transparent information out of the company.

[edit] June 24 00:30 CCP Pann in An overdue apology and request for parley