Nuance Software Developer reviews

Bad company culture with many miserable employees. Most of the good employees have quit, leaving a lot of inept people who don't care about their work. Total lack of respect for employees. The company is becoming more and more irrelevant as time goes on. Lack of professionalism. Department heads that bicker and fight during meetings. A terrible CEO (seriously, Google Paul Ricci). Ever declining stock price. Low pay. A culture of acquisition rather than innovation. Unethical business practices. Broken, over engineered software products. A commitment to outdated technology that is behind the times. No leadership or vision. Management responds to the need for change and innovation as if it is an attack or criticism of their not having built a company and set of products that will be perfect forever; they always seem to be in defense mode, even when someone simply makes a suggestion for a product improvement.

the employee evaluation process is poorly handled... you are graded on a bell shaped curve... the process is handled like the prom queen elections... favorites plays a lot in this scale... no matter what you do... you are not going to advance on this curve at evaluation time... only the favorites of the manager will get a high end of the curve in score. While they demand a 45 hour work week, I have at times consistently put in 60 hour weeks and that only gets me an "average" rating while people who come in after me and leave before me (and let me finish the work) get better ratings. The supervisors are petty and consistently balance the budget by laying off people... it seems to be a few of the older people who get fired then a month or so later they hire a young kid out of school. Oh, but the also generally fire a very young person so the statistics look good "on average". There is very little severance package to speak of... They provide no reason for loyalty to this company. At times the business is slow and during one evaluation, I noticed that the management blames the employee for not working on projects. The management actually said to me it was my fault I was not busy even though management hands out the projects to work on and I informed management that I had finished my last projects. Bonus time does not follow the company policy of established formulas... the state a 10% bonus policy but I have yet to achieve it. They randomly remove some or much of the promised bonus amount from annual distributions.. I don't think I have received more than 5% of the bonus promised in my hire documentation. There is no transparency as to why they remove some or most of the bonus. I notice that the CEO is the highest paid executive in Boston area while they claim that the snack budget for the office has to be eliminated because of budget problems. There is lip service to family work balance but it is only "lip service" and employees who try to strike a balance are whacked at evaluation time.