A Terminal Haven For The Mediocre. New Hires Beware - Your Time Is Limited
Pros
If you are charming enough to talk yourself into a sales position, you can milk a paycheck out of this place for the next year or two (as long as you don't do something to incur the arbitrary wrath of the CEO) that the company has remaining.
Cons
When the company was still making an effort to prosper, leadership's micromanagement incessantly impeded the ability of the technical staff to get anything done. For example, even $50-$100 purchases required the approval of 2 to 3 separate managers going up the chain, even sometimes including the CEO, who was never around to tend to the very things on which he insisted on having the final say. As you can imagine, not a lot gets done. Management took forever to respond to any concerns/criticism/internal company fires: While I was working there, I witnessed a product leader (who was prone to slamming doors, throwing/breaking equipment) relentlessly frustrate and anger the technical staff - programmers and QA/testing. The staff complained about this guy for months. By the time anyone from management sat down to talk with him, several developers had already handed in their 2-week notice. The development manager and head of QA left shortly thereafter, followed by yet a few more developers shortly after that. By the time the problematic employee was fired, there were only about 3 technical employees left in the company. Rather than addressing this incident with introspection, ("Perhaps we should address hostile, glorified JIRA administrators before they chase away the team members that matter?") management's tone was one of indignation. The company has no plans to hire more technical/development staff, and currently has no technical staff working on their flagship product, (a digital sign system, which is running on 10+ year old Microsoft WPF technology), and thus has no one addressing the technical problems plaguing this product. Because of the consistent problems with the product, clients are dropping AGS left and right. Rather than bringing on more developers to fix the broken product (or better yet, resuming development on the new one that the toxic product leader brought down in flames), leadership has opted to bring on more salesmen, with the intent of selling a defective product in the hopes of keeping the company alive a little longer. How much longer do they need the company to stay afloat? Long enough so that the upper management meets the time requirements specified in the Christie buyout contract, and so that they don't have to give back the six-to-eight figure sums of money they made on the backs of all of the hard work of the people who made the company what it once was.
