It's a bad place to work. - Software Developer CDK Global Employee Review

The thing to know about CDK is that they are a company that is mostly concerned with looking like a good company without actually being a good company. If CDK were a car, it would be a 4-cylinder 90's honda with a body kit and an 8" exhaust tip, and it would be driven by a guy who couldn't stop telling you how it was faster than a new porsche. CDK is a poser, basically. Once you understand that it all makes more sense. Because CDK is pretending to be good, you get a strong emphasis on selling. The company sells the product, but also tries to sell the image of innovation, of delivering, of being capable, of success. They try to sell this to employees and investors and customers. They work so hard to sell this, that they lose focus of doing things of real value. CDK relies on finding ways to sell what isn't good, rather than creating something good. What you see as a result is that selling becomes the job of almost everyone, down to the people who are supposed to produce the product. Even those at the lowest levels of production are asked to do what they can to sell, including posting positive reviews on glassdoor and liking things on facebook. Honesty (typically called "negativity") at any level is punished, because it tarnishes that image that management is so concerned about. If you are down in the trenches working on the product this whole focus on image over reality is really disheartening. I know I want to build a good product that people like. I don't like building some junk that CDK sales will pretend is far better than it is. I also don't like starting some project that will give no value and probably be cancelled before it's finished anyway, but that is a pretty common occurrence. Priorities shift constantly because the company is always trying to say what great important sexy feature they are about to release (many or most don't actually get released.. or if they are released they are not used because no one needed what was built.) Building stuff that is not needed happens when CDK is trying to appeal to customers (in this case things go wrong in the "telephone game" between the people taking the request from the customer and the people building the feature - if the people building the feature speak up about how it doesn't make sense they are being "negative.), but it also happens when one part of CDK is building something for another. A meeting about a new initiative will often start with requirements gathering, at which point the people in the meeting will speak up and say that what is being built is wrong or not needed or we already have a better one and the people in charge of the initiative will simply build whatever they thought they should build and make sure not to schedule any more meetings for input. This happens a lot. Usually the initiative fizzles out after a few months anyway, but some can go on for years and actually produce a result (and on being shown the result, people will point out we already have something better anyway and the whole thing was a giant waste of time.) Most initiatives go no-where. They are just the result of someone higher up hearing about how beneficial something is elsewhere, and showing leadership by trying to get that thing into place even if it doesn't make sense. Another company uses X to improve the performance of their Y? We also need to do that, even if we don't have a Y. The people making the decisions generally have no idea what we have or how it works, they just know buzzwords and being positive and selling. Initiatives can involve doing things that are nonsensical, unimportant, impossible, or actually counterproductive. The important thing about initiatives is that most will just fizzle away (except the counterproductive ones - those stick around) which is nice, but it means that no one is motivated to work on the rare beneficial initiative because they know it will be cancelled before completion anyway... or worse it will be turned into a counterproductive one. Once in a while we meet the VPs. This always goes badly because the meetings expose how little they know or care about what is actually happening. They also tell us to be excited about the exciting stuff we are working on, that we aren't actually working on, and have never heard of. The amount of pointless buzzwords used will make your brain hurt. Typically the meetings end with the VPs making some promises about how they will address our problems, and local management having to explain that they didn't really mean what they said. Every time many of the people are new because turnover is higher than a fast-food joint. These meetings are entirely image-building excercies that fail badly with all except a small percent of employees who are brand new or exceptionally naive. The sad thing is sometimes they talk about good ideas that make sense and business strategy that would give value, but we know none of that will ever go anywhere. While CDK tries to keep up their image, the productivity fails. Employees are not motivated. Nothing is actually postive or exciting. They keep adding cool-looking stuff to the 1990s honda but it's running worse than ever because they can't be bothered to change the oil and the fuel tank is almost empty. They're slapping a coat of paint on car that needs mechanical work. They're rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Take whatever comparison you want... it's bad.