If I had to sum up Autosoft, it's that everything you do day to day is at best ten times harder than it ought to be, at worst a hundred. As a software shop, it is glaringly mediocre, and overall not a solid place to build a career nor a solid skillset.
The company likes to call itself agile but it's really in name only. The company is currently driven by a pure waterfall deadline to release a new product later in the year, and every discussion, decision, and deadline is dictated by this one date. As one may imagine, it falls prey to all of the issues of waterfall. Estimates are impossible, priorities are constantly and consistently shifting, and there's absolutely no capacity to address risk. Anything that would take a little extra time in the name of code quality is suspect - proper architecture, and especially testing is ignored at best or shunned at worst, and phrases like "tech debt" and "unit testing" are nearly taboo. The underlying architecture is severely flawed and because of the waterfall approach, no one is ever seriously prioritized to fix these issues - as a result tons of time is wasted on basic bugs, slow toolchains that cause more harm than help, inconsistent implementations, and worst of all, a local environment so unstable that developers can literally be blocked for days. All of these problems have been brought up, and many engineers have solid solutions, but no one is ever prioritized to solve them because that would jeopardize the waterfall release date. An agile coach was brought in to help resolve some of these issues but the effect has been negligent at best - even if the dev teams change their processes, it doesn't matter when the rest of the organization doesn't adopt agile. Blockers are supposed to be handled by management but I can't point to a single instance of an issue being unblocked by them.
There are some downright bizarre technical decisions. The tech stack itself is ... suboptimal at best. The techs themselves are fine but implementations are so inconsistent and flawed, and understanding is so limited. The organization used to have an architecture team but all of these people were let go or otherwise left, and were never considered valuable, presumably in favor of all teams just magically "working it out" on their own. The most puzzling is a database team in which database engineers are required to do all database work for the application ... despite all other engineers being employed as full-stack. Many of the engineers here have strong back-end backgrounds and would have no troubles implementing what amounts to basic CRUD solutions, but are stuck waiting on singular database team resources, sometimes for multiple sprints. Again, many issues have been brought up, but they go into a black hole, never to be heard about again.
Many other reviews have mentioned the "yes-man" culture, especially of the CEO. I can't speak for him but there definitely does seem to be an air of "comply or else" within the organization. There is very little trust built between individuals and teams. Many engineers have great ideas, and are anxious to try and bridge gaps for the betterment of the organization, but these ideas are often completely lost in the wind. If you join, you may be inclined to share your own perspectives, but do so at a risk - at best, prepare for lots of resistance, and at worst prepare to paint a target on your back. More often than not, what happens is individual developers become one-person armies - with good ideas that are never consistently shared or supported, the end result being a muddled mess of a platform and a whole lot of demoralization. Be prepared to not be supported if you have problems - being let go or stigmatized for not conforming is absolutely a thing at Autosoft, the organization would rather just cut you loose than seriously work with you on significant issues. And forget about actually growing into another role - there is absolutely no growth opportunity within the engineering department, everyone is just a software engineer regardless of skill. And the turnover that other reviews has mentioned is absolutely real - for a company of this size, it's alarming how many technical people leave each month.
In the pros I mentioned that Autosoft is friendly to remote work. This is true, however be prepared to adhere mostly to an EST schedule since that's where the home office is based. Some teams are more open to discussion about it, but the conversations are theoretical at best. No support is given to the remote employees - the company refuses to provide more than a laptop and dock - no basic loadout or home office stipend - so if you don't have your own setup at home, be prepared for a suboptimal experience or to invest your own money in your home office. The company does try to have events that include remote employees, but there is an air in all communications that most perks are for in-office employees only. And be prepared to never meet your team - the company cancelled its annual holiday party in order to meet the deadline, and refuse to work to periodically invest in getting remote teams together, despite that being one of the keystones of successful remote teams.
TL;DR: This is just not a good place to work as a software engineer at any level. You can find a more immersive team, a more enjoyable platform, a friendlier group of people, a more-accepting culture just about anywhere. The negativity and mediocrity just ... radiates from everyone and everything at this company. I'll end with a story. My first interview with the company, the manager's first question was "so....what's up?" as if he had absolutely no plan for an interview - I proceeded to conduct most of the interview. The second round was a technical exercise we could barely complete because it was based on their local environment which was having significant performance issues that day. I remember thinking "this is a company that will offer me a job and I'll tell myself all these red flags are in my head, but I'll be absolutely wrong", and that's precisely what happened. If you choose to apply and join, at least as an engineer, do so with extreme caution. You can do better.
