Not the Auto/Mate of old, and likely never going back.
Pros
Generous PTO if you last long enough. Informal Atmosphere (At least back when people were in the office) Company as a whole has some fabulous people. Potential growth as a company after the recent acquisitions. Managers are pretty understanding about illness or sudden needs for PTO.
Cons
Low salaries for development positions. When talented people move to leave, they attempt to throw money at the problem to get people to stay, often at the level the person should have been making in the first place, which honestly is a bit insulting. While they claim there is opportunity for advancement, they give very little guidance of how to move up, or what actions a person should be taking in order to grow their careers in the company. When a mentorship occurs, it's usually due to a single manager singling someone out for it, and there is no formal program for growing/cultivating talent. Every development team is understaffed, has more meetings than they really should, and it creates a very feast/famine level of stress, often resulting in one-man-band style projects. It feels like there are far more meetings/planning than is really necessary, since those plans tend to fall apart almost immediately because of support issues and lack of resources. Management at times has ignored developer/engineer concerns for long periods and it comes back to bite them. Communication between teams/managers is pretty horrid and inconsistent. Not on purpose, but it's not uncommon to be blindsided by something another team was doing/not doing due to communication issues between managers or between managers and their team. Or to somehow be expected to know something that some other team put in a teams chat at some point rather than any sort of real announcement/notification. In addition, mixed messages are often sent about how important a task is (Team A will be told that what they're doing is so important and must be done.... yet no other team will step up to offer assistance when Team A is overloaded with work.) The old upper management (Prior to the acquisition) was incredible and knew what they were doing. Now.... we were just a small fish in a larger company and I am fairly sure the new upper management doesn't really care. It wouldn't surprise me if the Albany office eventually switches to just a call/support center in 5 years.
