It's a body shop, however much they may argue that they are not. It's really odd: some positions are effectively permanent (some people are stuck on projects with no possibility of advancement for years), and yet others are never ending revolving doors. Overall, they almost never seem to promote from within so your ability to actually move up in any way beyond a simple title bump and maybe bringing in an extra 4-5k for it seems extremely limited. There's a huge degree of variability in how busy you will actually be as an employee: everyone seems to either be stuck in neutral or ramped up into high gear. This can be a very frustrating environment to work in, even when you are surrounded by good people.
Management is poor, and the unstaffed HR of VP position for the last year has meant that resource management has been a complete joke. Part of the problem that they have with staffing positions, particularly development roles, is that there is actually no real understanding in management and HR as to the nuance of certain development tasks.
Speaking as a developer, most of the work is pretty dull too: it's 90% WCMS work, usually in poorly maintained environments that require a lot of clean up, with all the frustration that comes with the very traditional "hurry up and wait" mentality that is endemic in government contracting. Seriously, developers: almost no one in this company really understands what you do. Most of your work will be things you probably could have been doing with your eyes closed 15 years ago. Some of their more interesting projects, they can't keep funded. Aquilent is also loathe to ever push back on a client request, which is a frustrating environment to work in when most of your client contact points are non technical people who have little understanding of what they are asking for.
Aquilent can be a great place if you're on the right project (usually one that lets you stay in Laurel) for maybe 2 years, but I'm hardpressed to think of a reason even under the best of circumstances to stay longer than that. There are some really great people in important positions (PMs, tech leads), but by and large even they end up being really stymied by the fact that Aquilent is a bit cheap, and unwilling to push back on unreasonable client requests. The lack of advancement opportunities, and the complete lack of control you have as an employee over what sorts of projects you would like to work on means that you can very easily feel like little more than a line item on an account director's balance sheet, and you will be treated exactly like that.
There's also a complete lack of company wide development standards. Big portions of your work will be devoted to cleaning up old code (some that Aquilent has written) because there is generally a very poor QA and testing process on most work. If you are looking for a shop that does test driven development, and really knows and emobides best practices as a whole, this is not it.
For me personally, coming here has been probably a negative move for my career. I've been moved around more times than I care to think about in the last year and I've spent most of my time onboarding and offbaording projects rather than actually doing work. Generally, I feel like my skills have deteriorated, and certainly if I had known that this was 90% WCMS work, I would not have taken a job here. My interview was a little bit misleading (not intentionally so, it just feels that because almost no one who interviewed me knows about differences in types of development, that I got sold a bad bag of goods as a result), and this isn't unheard of. Aquilent does seem to have a reputation for hiring LAMP developers and then fitting them into boring WCMS cleanups in 15 year old content management systems. Developers be ware.
