Pros
There are some good people here.
Cons
• Low salary. Real or perceived. According to indeed to Indeed.com the average salary for an ELP in JavaScript in Dallas is $59,000. The average for JavaScript developers with experience is $82,000. The Starting salary at ARGO is $48,000. • Lack of Cost of living raises. Cost of living changes a lot year to year. Apartment rent increases and so do many other bills. Raises based on merit end up being equivalent to cost of living raises. • Lack of opportunities for advancement. Advancement is often based on opportunity. If you are on a small team and your boss was recently promoted it is difficult to get the required opportunities that are need to advance. • Inability to switch to a different team. The only people who seem to be able to switch teams are poor performers. People who are excelling are unable to move around. Many people want to move to a different team but are unable to. • Working with ADS (A 30 year old propriety language.). It is drop down menu driver and is difficult to navigate. This is a real issue for most programmers. No one wants to work with something that can’t help their career outside the company. • Working with poorly structured code. ARGO should use design patterns such as MVP or MVC, but currently the code is big ball of mud. • Working seven days a week for several months or not having work for months. Many projects have too much work and others have too little work. There is no balance. • Fear that concerns will not be heard by upper management. ARGO is supposed to be a flat company but most employees have never met or even seen our senior manager before. • Seeing people get fired and not know why. People want to know there job is safe. Seeing others fired and having no clue as to why it happened is concerning. Going along with this there are always rumors about why someone was let go (Such as chronic tardiness, poor code, etc.), but it seems like if that was the reason they were fired then many other people here should be fired. There is definitely a problem with people getting fired because there manager does not like them while other people are being retained because there manager likes them. Clashes in personality should not be a reason to be fired. • Poor communication/lack of care by senior managers. I was once in a meeting where a senior manager said that raises and bonuses during the last few years were not deserved. Also telling employees that there is $190 million dollars in the bank while laying off 20% of the work force just tells the employees that management cares more about money than people. • Corporate Culture. Because of low morale the corporate culture suffers. People come in late, they take long lunches, they leave early and they do not put a full effort into their job. This is the norm here. Many people start out working hard but once they see that no one else does, they become lazy too. This culture of not working a full 8 hours starts in training. During training new hires typically only spend 6-7 hours at work. • Layoffs 2 weeks before Christmas.
