My salary is kind was low compared to other similar positions in my field. I loved my time working at Aaron's, but I think my salary compared to the complexity of the projects being worked on and the effort of coming up with solutions was not worth it. (i.e. 60+ compared to 70k+ for similar roles elsewhere)
They do not match on the HSA which other companies do.
I also noticed that the technical debt the organization has: replacing new systems, updating old ones, building new integrations was large compared to the number of engineers and the whole team. Sometimes as an engineer you have to help the business owners understand their own process and how things should actually be done. Sometimes new projects are started with almost no planning or thought into how it should be approached, which team should be involved, and what other things may need to happen.
There are still a number of legacy systems and processes at Aaron's that are still in use and sometimes its hard for new engineers to understand them. They are working to phase out stuff but it can be hard sometimes.
As an engineer I was often helping figure out what we need to do in a process and how to protect the information instead of writing code to do the process and that was sometimes frustrating for me.
I started at Aaron's a year before John Trainor left as CIO and I feel like he did kind of get everyone on board and focused on the objectives we needed to do at any given time. After he left, things have remained the same but I felt like teams became siloed and didn't really talk to each other as much. With Covid and the work from home policy things didn't change for the better to me. The work continued but I think the collaboration and office talk stopped. I always wanted to see roadmaps on what was going on in each team and what their objectives were. I know they started the OKR process which should improve, and I know that will take time to see the results and hope it helps them. I was happy to see roadmaps of what is the most important features we need to be working on in the software systems to do.
