Pros
The compensation and benefits were good. I did have opportunities to work on interesting technology used by many.
Cons
Even though they hire more people than any company on the planet, they don't hire skilled developers. Among their only two skilled web developers, one of them hired me and we got along well, while the other hated me. She hated me because she was not used to working with experienced people and wanted to do everything on her own. As a result, she treated me very disrespectfully. When I tried to talk to her, she ignored me yet reported me to managers accusing me of harassment. I brought this up to leadership and even though they acknowledged she was being immature, their solution was to take me off the team where I had the most skill and put me on a Java team instead. They did this because they know they will have trouble finding skilled Laravel developers to replace her who will put up with their... unique environment, so they resolve to appease childish behavior. While working with the Java developers, I learned I made the right decision to use Laravel and PHP because Spring Boot and Groovy are just trying to imitate it, with not as much success. Dependency injection in Spring Boot is a joke and significantly outshined by Laravel's intuitive and flexible system. At this company, I learned that "architects" are people who pretend to know a lot but then ask you to figure everything out for them, despite them giving presentations to leadership convincing them that they are running the show. These "architects" would convince leadership they had a plan for rebuilding the Workbench web app and combining it with their desktop software, show them many fancy charts, but then relied on me to learn about Spring Boot for the first time and its authentication support, seemingly unaware of how they would have to refactor every single thing in the desktop software to accommodate their new plan. Most of the management was on edge because they knew their plan was too ambitious, so they were eager to blame me for their confusion. One manager said he was very offended when I said he was "mistaken" about something that he genuinely did not understand well so that I was trying to help him, and gave me a big speech about how you shouldn't say that to someone. I have never met anyone like that since, fortunately. A few tried to get me fired by lying about what I said. The leadership eventually got on board with blaming me for their lack of understanding of the technology they wanted to work with. Eventually I left before they could keep ganging up on me. Now they can finally blame themselves for their lack of planning, experience, and maturity.
