Pros
Some companies succeed because they have a strong sales team. Other companies succeed because they have an effective engineering team. Conductor has both. This is because there's a high level of transparency across the company. Every week the entire company attends product demos hosted by the engineering team. There's even a prize for the team that gets the most endorsements. Everyone is kept informed about our renewals, sales and overall customer satisfaction through goal based charts that are updated weekly. This motivates people to take pride in the product and gives everyone a sense of ownership over the customer experience. Everyone is made aware of how important their contributions are to the company. Feature releases, product milestones, important renewals and new sales are announced and celebrated with a speech, an honorary gong bang, a round of applause or all three.
The leadership makes a concerted effort to bring people together for fun activities as much as possible. I suspect that its motivated by a shared interest in soccer, flag football, basketball, picnics and good times. The kegerators are usually kept stocked even though people are often draining them on board game nights or tech meetups. Ardie Fuqua performed at the last casino night which was pretty awesome and the annual c3 conference where we meet the customers is always fun. Overall I would say its a great place to work, certainly the funest for me personally.
The engineering team encourages innovation and innovation is rewarded. I've been able to beef up my resume with many of the latest open source technologies like backbone, marionette and canjs on the frontend and thrift, hibernate and s3 on the backend. The application team is responsible for the entire web stack from the database down to the browser and we are moving towards the concept of a new feature team that will own an entire vertical from data collection and processing with hadoop and cloudera down to the graphs and reports in the webapp with highcharts and backgrid. As an engineer I am trusted with a larger role than the development of a specific portion of the stack. I personally have a great deal of interest in the latest developments in front end technology and I am encouraged to explore that. However I'm not limited by my interest and I have the freedom to expand my skills and grow in different directions as an engineer.
Cons
We've had to hire a lot of new engineers in the last year or so and the market has been tough because the demand has drastically outweighed the supply. Most good engineers are happy at their jobs but some of the ones that are looking may be difficult to please. We have a great culture and managers that genuinely care about people's happiness but it can be hard to satisfy everyone. This market can inflate a person's ego to the point that they are impossible to please. A few of the reviews I read made me sad for the people who wrote them.
There are great schools in the east coast but there are more tech companies in the bay area. Its not hard to find talented engineers but its an ongoing challenge to find talented engineers with lots of experience.
