Rough acquisition but there’s hope if you don’t care about remote
Pros
- Get to work on cool products for other developers - Engineering team is incredibly talented - Relatively small team so it’s possible to make big contributions and drive architecture change - Middle management is really trying to fix issues that have come up since the acquisition (regarding the now chaotic development process)
Cons
Surprising seeing all the reviews about the former owners as I really enjoyed working for them. They made the company remote-first during the pandemic and were listening to their workers. All the cons for me have come up as a result of Axosoft being acquired in the fall of 2020. New management wants to have a mandatory in-office policy after COVID. Despite becoming remote-first before the acquisition and having a company wide survey where the vast majority of workers said they wanted to stay remote, the new C suite is pushing to bring everyone back into the office (once it’s safe to do so). When expressing to the c suite just how great remote work has been for me and my team's productivity and health I received responses such as "You can't say you and your team are some special snowflake that go against the data" and "There are people out there who really care about work life balance and try to maximize their time outside of work, those types of people might not fit into the team we're trying to create here". Promotions have essentially paused Almost all developers are performing the responsibilities marked out in the position above their current role. Despite that, only two were promoted during the last round of performance reviews. There are some really incredible engineers at the company and they aren’t getting recognized for the contributions they’re making. Pay is competitive for Arizona (at entry level) but not when taking remote jobs into consideration Development has become chaotic They have doubled the size of the engineering team without having the same expansion in management, product/design, or QA. This has led to resources being spread very thin for developers to get clear requirements or ask questions regarding requirements. On top of that they started creating near impossible product timelines that have resulted in a lot of “crunch”. Leadership is aware of these issues though and are working on solutions to make the development process less chaotic. Lots of developers are leaving A lot of the dev team has left this past year, which has led to a huge loss of talent and product knowledge. Lack of diversity (especially in new leadership team) These are my thoughts a little over a year into the acquisition and I hope all these issues can get resolved. Working for Axosoft was a real dream of mine since I first discovered GitKraken in early college and it’s bittersweet leaving such a great team of engineers. If you’re based in Arizona, starting your career, and want to work in-office, I’d still recommend Axosoft but it’s definitely a work in progress at the moment.
