Great Technical Opportunity, Ruined by Culture/Management
Pros
I started at AllofE as an intern and worked for the better part of 3 years, eventually ending up as part of a newly formed leadership team. During that time, I developed valuable skills in coding and development workflow, and became an attractive candidate in the software development market. The day-to-day work was engaging and challenging, and I got to develop code that clients would see and use on a daily basis.
Cons
However, I would never recommend anyone to work for AllofE, except if you can't get a position anywhere else. The company's entire MO is to hire inexperienced candidates, wring as much time and effort out of them for as little pay as possible, and then silently drop them once they've outlived their usefulness. During my time there, management almost exclusively hired candidates which had little to no prior coding experience in a professional setting, usually fresh graduates. The pay is on the low side for software development, with middling benefits, and even with stellar performance and increases in responsibilities you can expect a maximum of an 8% raise. Short of that, expect 3-5%. Management will mention they work some Saturdays, except its really an expectation that you come in nearly every Saturday, and stay past the 6pm end of workday during the week as well. Even if you have completed your work, and there's no time-sensitive issues being dealt with, which is 95% of the time. You'll be expected to clock in and out even though you're a salaried employee, and be asked to take PTO for any bit of time under 8 hours that you're not clocked in. Management also has a hard stance against working from home/remotely for any extended period of time, and act as if software development requires time in-office to be performed successfully. Very little effort is put into team-building or socializing with coworkers, apart from 1-2 times a year where food was catered for an office lunch, or an hour some Fridays to drink and talk (which managers never attended). Other out-of-work gatherings existed, but died out when the developer that put in the effort to make them left the company. Several long-term developers have left during or shortly after my time there, with little mention or appreciation of their contributions to the company and their products. The CEO in particular is narcissistic and actively applauds the company's current culture which perpetuates these issues. They believe themselves, as a person, to be the primary catalyst for the growth of the developers. Many interactions with the CEO consisted of them talking personal philosophy and the steps needed for each employee to grow as a person, and wrongly attributing themselves for developers' improvements in technical ability and communication. Which is a shame, because AllofE's codebase presents a great learning opportunity. It's a mixture of legacy and newly-constructed code, that's reused across separate applications, with unique issues presented by client needs that have real-world implications. But management seems unconcerned about the cycle of acquiring new developers, working them raw until they gain enough knowledge and respect to realize they're being taken advantage of, then letting them go with a few choice words on their end.
