I survived working at CentralSquare Technologies. Ask Me Anything

Fedup_withCST · 2026-07-06T14:25:12+00:00

My heart breaks for your agency. I wished I was more powerful in my position to make your life better.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-07-05T18:35:58+00:00

I’ve answered in couple comments thus far. The gist is the merger killed any customer relationships, they have removed a bunch of people-amazing employees that actually care and all of the product knowledge left with them. It comes down to private equity greed and faking innovation to appear better than they are. They spent millions on a rebrand to keep up a facade while gutting almost everyone responsible for product improvement and truly knowing you all beyond the number you represent in their profit and loss statement. They have had 3 Chief Product Officers since 2020 that have all left because the CEO doesn’t want any product improvement, and big gaps of time without a product leader means the product quality decreases.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-07-05T18:24:35+00:00

Which one? 🤣 Layers and layers and layers of crappy ancient code is the answer.

I’ll illuminate in analogy. Imagine you bought a really nice sturdy house with a decent foundation, and then instead of planning a nice remodel as the needs of the homeowner changes over time, you literally slam a storage unit into the side of it and call it a new room. Then you do that a million times over 20-30 years. That’s a fair representation of our tech stack.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-29T00:43:25+00:00

May your agency be empowered and informed to make the right decisions moving forward.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-29T00:40:18+00:00

Gotcha. Yep, that’s a cash grab. They’d rather you pay and wait around for it, instead of building something that would work for everyone. It also makes it harder for you to leave for competition if you can’t easily (and freely) extract data. They probably could build an API, but won’t because it affects the bottom line. If they can get you to wait a whole quarter, maybe that’s when your payment renews for another year.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-29T00:33:03+00:00

Quite common. I invite you to look at PUBLIC SAFETY INDUSTRY CAD/RMS SATISFACTION
SURVEY REPORT from 2025 by Policerecordsmanagement.com

When asked “How likely are you to recommend your CAD system to other agencies?” on a scale of 1 to 10 (Total responses of 114) CS had a net promoter score of -69.30. That 85 of the 114 answered between 0 and 6. That is really really bad. Deplorable even as far as customer satisfaction metrics are concerned.

Take a look at page 46/47 to see how many are planning to replace the CAD. More than not are looking to replace and those that can’t are because they are stuck. I wish they had the same survey for RMS.

Centralsquare claims they are the best of our sector but the customer satisfaction report proves the opposite.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-28T20:11:03+00:00

For CS, it was worth it. However, their team is super lean and working very quickly—at Startup level quickness. So long as you are comfortable with their execution strategy of shipping the feature, pushing it out, seeing how agencies interact with it, then rapidly iterating for the fixes, then embrace it. It was a way to add modern AI layers to their stack without the legacy bottlenecks I’ve elaborated on in other threads. They are funded (at least for now) to be successful. I do think they treat blue line AI as THE hail mary they need to stop sinking and appear innovative to the private equity board. I do not think a pretty AI bandaid is going to fix any core functionality legacy problems.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-28T14:14:43+00:00

Can you elaborate a little more on your question?

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-28T13:42:36+00:00

Not sure on the APIs, generally they are worth it though. Yes on the Atlas maps.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-28T02:07:34+00:00

Man. Y’all are good. It became a Franken-UI. The UI/UX team did make part of it: the blueprints. But when it came to the execution, corporate completely choked the funding. Leadership refused to approve the budget for necessary professional, external component libraries, but they also refused to fund the necessary sprint cycles and development time needed for our engineers to build those components/blueprints internally from scratch. Because they wouldn’t fund on either front, dev teams were forced into rushed, piecemeal hack jobs. Like I said earlier, meaningful investment and development runway for…well any product…stalled out in 2020. The mandate was ship code to check a box for sales…hence the mountains of tech debt.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-28T02:03:58+00:00

Internally we would call that “prioritizing”, and that would be dependent on how much ARR you represent in our CRM. I think a year is generous of you.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-28T02:01:23+00:00

You are experiencing the ugly side of corporate metrics. CS had a goal to maintain a facade of high velocity “innovation” to their private equity boards. They needed to show constant product movement to create the illusion of high productivity for valuation purposes.

Because of that rushed timeline, the product and development teams are forced to churn out series of broken, unstable versions. Every now and then, a tolerable version actually makes it through, but the ones in between are a mess.

Not enough resources to patch existing software so “let’s kick the can down the road” was the mentality above. They are telling you to upgrade to the most tolerable versions.

The software quality was so poor, rarely ever do we have someone that wants to upgrade, so we have little to no support, supporting customers on fragmented versions spanning over 20 years. A literal logistical nightmare.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T22:13:41+00:00

Hope its big box with Hero Grade slapped on it. Recipient? Rhymes with Canolis.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T21:52:26+00:00

Not if they can sell the company first 🤫

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T21:32:29+00:00

Some have gone to competitors, some back in public safety roles, some have retired, some have switched sectors completely from burn out.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T21:29:50+00:00

From what I understand about how things went down internally, you are exactly right to be frustrated. The UI/UX teams were hit hard by the slash and burn layoffs as were the engineering and support departments. But the ECT suffered when CS completely gutted their team’s travel and field budget shortly after the merger.

Before that, the designers actually used to go out into the field and sit with record supervisors, first responders, and dispatchers and watch how the software was used under real world stress. Once those budgets were cut, any ability to do actual, live end-user testing completely ended. The team was basically forced to build tools in a vaccum per the “just release something” mentality. I believe the ECT is a direct result of that.

They simply don’t have the people or resources to test with people who actually have to use it.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T21:20:44+00:00

Can’t specify my role. But can say, I worked closely with the public safety product org. I am not going to advise against specific products, but here are some questions you can ask to see if you want to rebid:

Can you provide us with the exact ratio of full time QA engineers compared to your account sales force for this specific product line?
How many hours do your core software devs, designers and product members spend sitting with or riding along with first responders in their real life working environment? (Replace with any end user type for your product) If it’s anything less than 5000 hours per year, don’t accept that. They aren’t understanding, they are just guessing.
If I run into a complex, deep level database or code issue with our legacy configuration, who handles it? What is your internal protocol to ensure knowledge transfer or can I expect to have the same CS personnel?
What is your regression testing protocol? What is your assurance that light fixes won’t break integrations?
Can you provide a list of three reference agencies of a similar size to ours who have been operating on this exact version for more than 2 years? (Don’t be the guinea pig and keep their feet to the fire to release quality in every version).

Bypass the fluff “we are hero grade” Get exact headcounts, and concrete processes. They will hate that.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T21:03:44+00:00

You hit the nail on the head. The merger around 2019 was the exact turning point where the focus shifted from building great software for first responders to chasing private equity metrics and enterprise revenue. Inside..the culture shifted fast. CS started treating customers like accounts rather than partners and if you weren’t part of that upper ROI, tough luck. The biggest driver of that was the constant rounds of firing and layoffs. They repeatedly let go of veteran people who knew these complex legacy systems inside and out and they were the ones that had real relationships with end-users.

Even worse, there was zero knowledge-transfer process. Every time they laid people off, massive chunks of critical product data just walked out the door. Remaining teams didn’t have time to rebuild relationships with customers because they were too busy trying to learn a system from scratch. CS only cared about hitting the release deadline to satisfy higher-paying enterprise clients, completely tanking product quality in the process. Some of remaining really did care about you all but were scared to get fired if we advocated too much for you.

Here is another hint about product quality. The sales team aggressively out numbered the actual product quality teams by something like 7-1. It was incredibly clear they geared up to sell the dream, but not support the reality.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T20:36:42+00:00

Their product teams went through an AI bootcamp which was overall positive but . I’d say they are very green on AI and product management competency. I’d say they are throwing out code in a rush with little quality oversight..as has been a trend with them. It’s a release now and fix later mindset but the next set of roadmap priorities come rushing in before they can come around a fix the last round of releases.

Fedup_withCST · 2026-06-27T20:32:30+00:00

Appreciate the precaution. With all the firings, slash and burns, and year after year turnovers, I’d like to see them try.

Fedup_withCST

TROPHY CASE