SANS Institute Employee Reviews for Anonymous Employee

"1. Many layers of directors and managers for teams as small as two people. The hierarchy is incomprehensible, and you didn’t know from one day to the next who would be setting the process at that time. Managers often override each other without consulting one another, resulting in lots of wasted effort by employees trying to satisfy conflicting agendas. 2. Communication was incredibly bad; it was like a big game of Telephone. It was common to hear about an upcoming policy change from a peer instead of your manager. Some managers would 'leak' stuff to their employees while other managers would refuse to acknowledge the same information to their employees well after it had become common knowledge. This resulted in a constant environment of borderline paranoia, confusion, and miscommunication among staff. 3. No clear vision of the future, the company was changing direction on a weekly basis, based largely on the advice and oversight of a friend of one of the higher ups who was hired in from some manufacturing company. The logic was apparently that if you can shave microseconds off of an assembly line, that the same can be accomplished by (yes, this actually happened) following employees around with a stopwatch and interrogating their every move (again, no hyperbole), regardless of the fact that assembly line work couldn't be further from our work. 4. The entire company, but especially the event staff and upper management, was extremely clique-y. There were many "friends of friends" type new-hires who treated the job like a party bus, then were rewarded for it, while others worked well and hard, and were treated less than fairly. I saw a lot of really good talent walk out the door out of sheer frustration and/or get fired for irrelevant issues. 5. The HR department has conflicting interests with management and employees and is there strictly to protect the company; they are not an employee advocate and don't effectively communicate with employees, if at all."