Pros
• Small company with friendly dedicated staff, everyone seems to enjoy helping each other succeed – unlike some companies I have worked at this is not a dog eat dog culture, but instead each employee helps out each other so that the whole company is successful.
• Most of the clients are volunteer organizations (like the American Red Cross, Best Friends Animal Society, USO) and you feel like you are really helping the people that need help the most when you deliver your software.
• Senior management are extremely dedicated to the company and work very long hours. Their focus is very much on delivering the best products that make our clients successful. No one is playing golf here.
• Due to size of company (around 30) you find yourself working on lots of different jobs and picking up new skills as required, much better than working on the same thing for years.
• Frequently adopt new technologies when possible – over the last few years they have moved 100% of their environment to the Cloud which was a big undertaking for a 16 year old company built on a propriety system.
• Autonomy when working on some projects so you get to really focus on building the whole module, not just a piece of it.
• They are quick to use 3rd party services for products that are not part of their core product niche and there is little sign of “not invented here” syndrome.
• Offices downtown in the heart of Austin.
• Benefits and holidays are good for a company this size.
• Casual dress.
• The work is challenging and the hours are long.
Cons
• Small company size means sometimes we are stretched a bit thin and there is extra pressure to get things done on tight time schedules. This is almost by definition part of being a small company so unless you work at a big corporation you should expect this at any start-up.
• There is not a formal career path so if you are looking for that go and work at IBM or the State
• Sometimes software is delivered with bugs. This has improved a lot over the last 12 months as they have adopted much stricter QA processes and quarterly pushes
• No advanced courses or conferences for senior developers
• They were overly reliant on proprietary systems but have slowly but surely been moving to open source systems
• The work is challenging and the hours are long.
