Catherder originally came about since I work a lot with people whose big problem is that they work way too long and hard. Unhealthy overtime becomes the norm, burnout follows, and good people end up leaving organizations that can ill-afford the loss.
Tess allowed us to see trending counterproductive overtime, stick to legal TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) obligations, vacation, and sick days, and make sure staff stayed healthy, rested, and firing on all cylinders.
Audit compliant, one-click approvals via email, nice reporting and alerts, this was an “off book” project with an easy weekend-to-MVP solution.
Catherder was then further enhanced as a “bench” project for more general HR use cases inside Pivotal Labs and rolled out for all APAC staff across our five contributing countries post-acquisition.
Sadly, Pivotal’s acquisition by Dell, and required integration of their enterprise HR software (which was terrible, imho) for this sort of thing, meant Catherder was supplanted by something worse (that everyone hated),
I still think its simplicity and ease-of-use for managers and staff make it far superior to most commercial HR systems I’ve seen. There was honestly an entire other business there with “less sucky HR software” if one chose to take the core and extend it to that byzantine field.