Cascading failures on multiple fronts leave the company in a crisis state.
Pros
Primo downtown location, if that is your thing. Across the street from Power & Light and a block from streetcar access. Partnership with OneLife Fitness across the street, great deals on personal training with an on-staff trainer providing assistance. Free membership as well. Offices are very neat and well maintained, office format is midway between open office and cubicles, separate enough to feel private but open enough for great co-worker communications. Two days of working from home a week. 401k match up to 5% of salary, 0.5% for each percentage after that up to 7%.
Cons
Below market pay across the board. Lack of investment in on-prem, full-time development. Out of company & country contractor partners are hard workers but they make up the most of development staff at this point, leading to little oversight of overall quality of completed work, interpersonal investment in the company, and the lack of proper incentives for them to do more than the minimum in some cases. Reliance on legacy technologies and proprietary software to assemble solutions is an extreme limiting factor to developing maintainable software. An exodus of development staff both from layoffs and from people reaching the same conclusion as I did is leaving a lot of these legacy technologies without owners or the know-with-all to support it. While it wasn't always this way, honestly a toxic culture. This is especially true for the product I was working on for the past two years. Too much reliance was put on sales for this product that should have never reached market as quick as it did. We were always under the target of executive management but yet we're never given the support or leeway to solve key technical debt holding the product back. Very much a 1 step forward, 2 steps back kind of frustration. While I can't expect 100% transparency, it is clear that executive management is incapable of facilitating communication channels between the various branches of the company. This led to various points of failure and miscommunication across the board. Work life balance is a complicated one, some will definitely be in a role where this is manageable, but at least in the experience of mine and my direct co-workers, was negative. Workload was filled with ill-conceived deadlines and scope, with little to no forethought as to ask development whether or not it was feasible or not. Many times during my tenure me and several co-workers had targets on our backs to meet these hard customer deadlines with management garnering little sympathy or learning any lessons from these extremely obvious struggles. Many people, including myself, worked exorbitant work schedule to support these deadlines and continual stream of customer issues. At the end of the day, all of the above points interacted and created a caustic cycle that we could seemingly never get out of. Any success was a point for more and more to be put on our plate without regard of the critical failures we endured on the way there.
