3Pillar Global reviews

3.1

45% would recommend to a friend

(734 total reviews)
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Michael Detwiler

32% approve of CEO

39% positive business outlook

3Pillar Global has an employee rating of 3.1 out of 5 stars, based on 734 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The 3Pillar Global employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

734 reviews
1.0
Jan 17, 2018

Struggle Bus to Failure Town

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The Romania team is what makes this company work. Work life balance is great. It's a lifestyle company. You get to work from home a lot and workdays are short, which means things get done slowly because no one is around. The Fairfax office can be a ghost town and I rarely saw collaboration take place, except for maybe around the foosball table.

Cons

Leadership: Amateur executives are all new to the company, making rookie decisions and throwing each other under the (struggle) bus. They are soft. If you look hard enough you can read through their phony act. The leadership dynamic is unhealthy and they cannot be trusted. You should question why they’ve had 100% executive turnover in the last 18 months. Company Performance: The company is struggling, which has caused so much unrest - people are jumping ship or being asked to leave. The inexperienced CEO is thrashing out and has made reckless decisions in order to keep the company from sinking. He is prone to acting before he thinks through repercussions fully. The CULT(ure): Mediocrity is celebrated. They do average work and it's accepted as Minimum Viable Product. They encourage failure and freely own and apologize for their mistakes – calling it “smart failure”. The catholic cult(ure) undertones how business decisions get made based on ultra right wing, pro-life, conservative religious values, regardless of financial impact. The dysfunction abounds. They tout Agility, Innovation and Integrity as CULT(ure) values. Here is what that looks like: Agility: they like to experiment a lot. Trouble is they are constantly experimenting with new organizational structures. It’s as if they think people are disposable, regardless of impact on careers and livelihoods. They are addicted to agility so much that they don't allow enough time to see if the last change worked. Be prepared to work in a schizophrenic constant state of chaos. Innovation: Real innovation is not taking place. The product mindset and design thinking are not new concepts. They use post-it's for brainstorming. (Slow clap) Integrity: They claim integrity but most are just faking happiness and talking behind each other's backs. The CEO preaches sermons about integrity, but he is not loyal to his team, unless you are in his inner catholic circle. They don't have policies, which makes it easier for them to play favorites, politics and operate inconsistently. They will coax you into believing you can share thoughts transparently and say what you really believe, but be careful with your words because they hang on every one as if it was gospel. If they had a strong sense of integrity, they wouldn't have invested the equivalent of a person’s annual salary to have an executive offsite retreat at a 4 star resort during the same period of time as they were having layoffs.

2.0
May 18, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Given the horror stories given below, you'd probably think there are no pros at all. However, there actually are some pros to 3Pillar. The benefits, PTO, and salary are actually very good and competitive for the DC market. PTO is "unlimited" and it is actually encouraged to be used, which is rare. 3PG does take a step up and allows work at home in an environment that isn't micromanaged, which allows senior engineers the flexibility to be responsible while maintaining a balance. 3PG does monthly happy hours where snacks and beer is provided and they also do bi-annual awards. These are all great ways to build a good culture with good people. Lastly, the people at 3PG are a joy to work with -- co-workers are awesome to work with and there are very smart, talented developers there that offer great technical advice. I suspect that working at 3PG in the US is very enjoyable (as long as you are not in US Engineering).

Cons

If you are a technical person in the US, you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. 3Pillar is nothing more than an outsourcing development workshop. The US technical team is very small (think under 10) and there is no vision/plan for how to use them. You will hear many great things about US Engineering like “Seal Team”, or “We do the hard problems — easy ones go overseas”. Do not fall for their trap. Once you are there, you will be told many times over how you are a very expensive resource and they have to get to profit as fast as possible so your job is to move projects offshore as fast as you can. In practice, this just doesn’t happen…you will be working with offshore teams doing early meetings with them and trying to help them along. The best part is, the offshore team wants nothing to do with you. They will have engineering meetings and make crucial decisions while you are sleeping because they don’t want your advice. They will make some really junior mistakes (like not knowing how to deal with timezones in code or including multiple front-end css libraries and then use both everywhere). Your time will be spent fighting these battles and fixing these mistakes so you aren’t embarrassed when talking to the customer. The customer’s get angry and will call the team out publicly when a bug happens that shouldn’t have and frankly, the customer is right. I was embarrassed being in front of the customer countless times explaining how we could make this type of mistake. If you aren’t working with an offshore team, then you are most likely working by yourself on a project so easy that an intern could do it. They hired an architect and then put him on a project where he had to write sql queries to make some graphs (he quit 2 weeks after being hired — shocker). Or you will be migrating someone else’s code to AWS or you will be making a web front-end backed by Google Docs that outputs graphs for a sales team. The customer feedback will be “make the graph more bumpy” and so you will be changing a Google Spreadsheet so the data fits what the sales team wants. The most “interesting” option that you can do is a standard web app, probably written in React with a Mongo back-end. It will most likely be a CRUD web app that everyone has done a million times. You will hear about how exciting the projects “in the pipeline” are, but in reality they are not exciting. Digitizing a trucking company’s records is not exciting work for a dev…it may be exciting and groundbreaking in the trucking industry, but there is not much excitement for a skilled US developer. In reality, 3PG will take any work a customer has that will pay for US resources — even if it is the most boring, mundane work. Lastly, upper management attempts to be your friend and often spins it that they have your best interest. You will be promised a promotion or a bonus and then come review time, you will be told there is no budget for promotions/bonus. Multiple devs have attempted to quit to go work directly for the client (because working 60+ hour weeks for 3PG does you no good — at least if you worked for the client, you’d get some credit or ownership in it). This attempt to quit starts with a friendly “yea, we will support you in this” and may even go as far as management announcing you are leaving for this new opportunity. Then you will be blindsided about “breach of contract” with your NDA and will be told you can’t do it. This is embarrassing, especially when it was announced to everyone already. The upper management is all over the place and has no clue how to run or handle US Engineers. Every week will be a new story of “we are dropping your contract”, “we are keeping the contract”, “we have awesome work in the pipeline”, “we have nothing in the pipeline”…it is maddening and doesn’t give us any confidence that things are working smoothly. So in summary, you will be hired for a very exciting role in doing groundbreaking projects that are hard and innovative. You may be hired as a .NET developer or an iOS developer, but in reality you will do any project that the customer is willing to pay for a US resource. If that is managing a devops pipeline or Jira training, then that is what you will do. 3PG will take any work that is paid, it is a pure staff aug culture and they have no core competencies.

1.0
Aug 7, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good salary, nice benefits & activities.

Cons

Some people you work with here are horrible persons... management sucks, they don't care about the employees, you can't change the project as they tell you when you go to an interview. The technical level is on the very low side... they usually hire people because are unable to retain the ones which they already have. The job title in the company doesn't match your skills but the needs of the client on the project: the client needs a Senior, fine, your are a Senior then even if you are not... The client is the only entity which matters, if the client is happy, you will receive a rase & all sort of bonuses. The company promotes the wrong people just because they bring money to the company.

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