Crossover for Work reviews

As you may know the business model of Crossover (and more generally - ESW group, which Crossover is part) is buying software companies and developing their product. They say that they make products great, but I didn't see that. The real process is simple. They hire software engineers and architects and attach them to products. Nothing new in SW development world. That’s all! :-) Really, no new processes or technologies! (git or CI are surely in use, but they are known to everyone now). Engineers and software architects are trying to learn product and solve bugs, but nobody really look for this process, tries to improve or change it. Direct managers are even not holding SCRUM stand-up meetings! You may work for several month and never speak to your manager :-) It seems that Crossover's executive management is waiting that some new hire will teach him SCRUM, DevOps and how to manage :-) I also never seen that sales team even exist! I mean highly professional sales teams with sales managers, pipeline management and so on. Yes, that sell their products from time to time, but number of deals is so little, so I don't think they earn enough money to pay salary… (Trust me, I've been working for huge companies (like Microsoft), and know how sales should work to earn enough money!) You may ask, how do they pay salary? I think the answer is simple. ESW is private company which is "well funded" as they say. Owners have created company which is very similar to real software business. I may guess that they are presenting this business with all it advertising to potential investors and get their money. (Also don't forget that ESW is private, so they don't need to conduct audits of publish financial reports as public companies do. So they can do whatever they want with investors' money.) Thinking about my experience at Crossover, I can say that it may be good place if you starting your career and going to have some place with challenging tasks and average payment. Or if you're going to increase your professional level in some product or technology and would like to be paid during you learning and developing your skills. But surely it is not suitable for long work (more than several month). I've personally spent 3 month on one maintenance team then been switched to another and finally to third, where I've been fired after 2 weeks on the project. You may think why I was switched from one team to another? May be I'm not so good? As two of my managers said, I have good performance when worked on their teams. I even become best performer on one team during 3rd month. I think they prefer to leave those employees who already been on the team than those who joined the team (Yes, I seen people who worked for 2-4 years for single project!) In general this is good approach (you have an engineer or two who thoroughly know product and will be able to maintain). I seen such approach many times in almost every ordinary organization (even organizations located in my local city and not known anywhere). But such approach doesn’t allow to make great company with great products.

Communication not fluid enough, somewhere along the way it always geta stuck.