Poor culture limits career growth. Know what your getting yourself into
Pros
- Lots of remote positions - Company owned entirely by two owners: This can be and is also a con, but the pro is that DDN is not like many of its large competitors that leverage outside investors and debt to grow, rather they maintain a constant profit and have for over 20 years. The owners are great business men in this regard and know how to make a profit. Why you should care is because the company culture is driven by this business model and the owners’ management style, and it can affect your career growth and happiness even at the bottom of the ladder. - Work with bleeding-edge tech - Dynamic work and always changing. Easier to make changes than large companies
Cons
- Review from the perspective of a Service/Pre-Sales employee. Sales side of the company may be completely different because thats what the company values most. Very sales and engineering driven company, every other org comes second. Probably normal for a privately owned company, but consider this if working non-sales/eng. Con about two owners is that they micromanage upper management. This makes Upper/Middle management either 1) Leave - there is a high turnover of Eng Managers/PM/Directors/C-Level positions. 2) Stay and just keep the owners/your manager happy, keep the status quo, and accept the limited freedom to A) do your job how you’d like and 2) to hire who you’d like. This culture trickles down to the bottom. The high turn-over culture makes you feels like your always replaceable and every man for himself. Very reactive culture, fighting fire-to-fire, sale-to-sale. - Due to being for profit/privately owned, company growth drives everyone’s career grown (promotions, raises, salary adjustments). Unfortunately sales growth has been flat for several years and therefore so has the average employee’s career growth. Meaning, going above-and-beyond is not rewarded, yearly raises/bonuses are below 3% (or sometimes cancelled all-together), promotions are few and far between (and typically only for middle to upper management (when someone leaves), training programs have diminished. Yearly performance reviews have removed the self-assessment, meaning HR no longer cares to record your yearly accomplishments or how you met your prior year’s goals - only your manager’s perspective of your accomplishments is recorded. Since these are career growth killers (what most care about), I’d look elsewhere if you are an ambitious high performer looking for growth. But if you're looking to just maintain a salary and work from home, but don’t really care about growth (those near retirement), you may be happy here.
