Pros
* Some very nice people. * Industry average pay. * Flexible work-from-home policies, snow days, and the modicum of human decency you expect from a modern software company. * Free cookies, soda and pizza just laying around. * Attend hip conferences and further your education, if you work in Product Development. (Other departments, not so much.) * Decent health benefits, and a HR staff that seems to be making positive changes in policy bit by bit.
Cons
* Unqualified and inexperienced people at many levels. * Micromanagement is encouraged and can be seen in all departments. * People who are unable to perform their job linger at the company indefinitely. * Few product leaders who are concerned with the market or the customer. The good ones do not stick around because management does not understand their role or how to support them. * No support for the work of QE or the design teams, who are in a similar boat. They are ignored or disregarded until urgently asked to find or fix mistakes that could have been prevented. * Development takes the brunt of poorly managed projects, as work reaches them months or years late (with no consequences), then dev is expected to deliver in the short window remaining. Working nights and weekends isn't uncommon. Schedules are not adjusted until the day of expected release, and there are no project managers at ctct to track progress before work hits development. * General inability to do what you were hired for, due to a lack of understanding around your given field, and the assumption that in a start-up everyone does everything. * Assumption that company is a giant 1500+ person start-up, and "process" is a bad word that only grown-up companies use. * Idea that waterfall = evil and agile = good because it means no project planning is required. You just build stuff, throw it on the wall, and see what sticks. * Culture... The company has bent over backwards to attract people who seem hip and cool without much concern for skill level. This salves aging executive egos - they want to feel part of a young hip start-up. * The technology follows the lines of the culture. Make it pretty, make it slick. Whether or not it can be used is an afterthought. * Lot of stress and hoopla around "innovating" and flying by the seat of your pants. Innovation is one of the few ways things happen here, but innovations are frequently ideas people had in the shower that morning, or major initiatives the company should have completed years ago. * There are no analytics or tracking for most of the products. Google Analytics is being used to capture a high level page view report, utterly insufficient for a complex product suite. Support calls and Google ultimately determine the direction of the product, rather than data or research. * Major shifts in management, new boss every few months syndrome. Re-orgs are so frequent they begin to go unnoticed. * Politics are the way everything flows and functions at this company. You have to be either the loudest, strongest personality in the room or highly political to be at all effective. There is no process for most workers to simply get their jobs done.