Outstanding Culture, Extremely Understanding, Modest Pay
Pros
1) The culture at Cardinal is second to none. I've worked at many different places and never have I gotten along with and enjoyed the company of the folks I work with at Cardinal. Since starting at Cardinal I've turned down multiple job offers with substantially hire pay because I can't bring myself to leave the culture of Cardinal behind for the stuffiness of some run-of-the-mill IT firm. 2) Need to work from home? No problem. Need to leave early for a doctor's appoint? Hope you feel better! Not feeling productive on a Wednesday and want to make up some time on the weekend. Sounds good. Cardinal is unlike any other company I've worked for when it comes to leniency and understanding. They care a lot less about the hours you work and a lot more about the quality of the deliverables. 3) There are lots of social events and ample opportunities to get to know your coworkers. There are monthly happy hours, the company picnic, night at the Reds game, the holiday party, practice meetings, lunch and learns, sports leagues, and more and all of it is paid for in full by the company. Before joining Cardinal, I came from (what I thought was) a fairly laid back, social company but Cardinal has blown that perception away with how much effort they put towards events like this.
Cons
1) The pay is modest. Off the top of my head I know of several folks (myself included) who know for a fact they're very underpaid. That said, for a lot of us, the culture and other intangibles of working at Cardinal make up for this. 2) I can echo some of the sentiment from other reviews here in that there seems to be a limited amount of "senior" personnel - folks who can act as authorities on various subjects. There are a lot of good people at Cardinal but sometimes it's hard finding someone with a ton of experience and expertise to lean on when you need to learn and learn quickly. 3) Standardization and "process" is still an issue at Cardinal. For example, we recently just "updated" our intranet but even after the update it's not clear where to store project information, where to do wiki pages or documents explaining various technologies or experiences at clients. we also have blogging capability on our company site but it hasn't been communicated at all how someone should "officially" go about contributing to the blog. Unless you're a CQ5 developer with access to the CQ environments, you're at the mercy of manually emailing or stopping by offices to try and see how you can contribute. 4) Retention is a serious problem in my opinion. Cardinal spends a lot of money and time on recruiting to get fresh talent in the door but they let outstanding employees walk away simply because of money (in most cases). I can name off several people off the top of my head, just from the last two years, who absolutely loved Cardinal but left for a substantial pay raise.
