Pros
I worked twice at Brightree over the last ten years in development management. The first time was for 6 years; then I left for another startup and decided to come back after 3 1/2 years. After one year back working at Brightree, I had to move across country and leave.
I have been working on software for about 20 years in multiple companies, and I do think that Brightree is one of the best options as a software company. Not only they are highly successful and profitable, but also they have multiple product lines, which means there is always something new or different to work on. Also, it is one of the few platforms where you will be exposed to the complexity of running millions of transactions per hour per day in a mission critical system within acceptable response times (read < 1 sec to last byte).
As you can read from other reviews, there is a mix of languages that is used, but everything is consistently being moved to the latest c# / .net version. Some of the older software is in very old versions of programming languages (vb) because it was acquired through mergers. Yes, there is an overlapped period of time where you need to maintain the old code base (not that fun) while rewriting / refactoring to the latest technologies (very fun).
I would also like to put some balance to the realities of software companies. Although it is true that there is maintenance work (as in any other place), there is also a ton of new products and features that are being built all the time. As a matter of fact, last year we deployed a brand new product. From design to beta, in 6 months. I cannot disclose what product or with how many resources, but I can tell you that this type of projects happen all the time; if anything, we were always looking for bright resources that would help us jump ahead the competition and make a big impact with our customers. And no, this product was not written by making people work 12 hour days either. It was a solid effort across 3 teams to provide the new leading edge platform for a new vertical.
On the culture and growth potential. Again, here I can tell you first hand that all the technical staff that showed they were good and cared about our customers were always taken care of. It is a Scrum/agile shop, and everyone is welcomed to become the tech lead or the scrum master for his/her team. This is great if you think you want to try a bit of management through the scrum role, or more of a technical career advancement through the tech lead role. At that point though, your peers become the system of promotion. We had situations that were amazing with some people stepping into scrum master role and being great at it, while others not that much.. that is as expected, not everyone is ready to be a manager or a lead. The important point here is that Brightree does give everyone the opportunity to try and iterate on these roles. If someone is not ready today, they can improve in the areas that needed improvement and try at another time.
My last year at Brightree I was managing 3 teams and multiple projects. For the most time, I would work from 8-5, and some weeks had to work more from home (a couple of hours for 2 or 3 days); My preference was to work from home a couple of hours. So from my experience it is definitively not a back breaking culture. It is software; sometimes is relaxed sometimes is not, and not surprisingly the last week of each sprint is more stressful than the prior one.
The last thing I would like to mention here is that there is no "developer on call" role. There is a dedicated team of datacenter engineers that take care of most issues and rarely does a developer need to be bothered outside of work hours. This really denotes the quality and caliber of the Brightree systems.
Cons
Brightree's approach to reviews is an informal one where they rely on each manager to work with their direct reports; to manage and motivate them and to recommend increases. I do prefer a more structured approach and more guidelines across the company. Something more formal basically. Some employees also prefer to be reviewed with the same cadence and same process as everyone else in the company.
You can probably grab any paragraph from the Pros section and put it as a con based on the individual
