Pros
As a software engineer you do get to solve problems that help people do business and I have learned so much from the various technology teams at Aaron's. Decent amount of holidays and the PTO is actually pretty good for most everyone working there. I love the open office and the windows at Park Place and Galleria, they do help make work enjoyable compared to cubicles even though most people are now working from home since Covid. Good team to work with and have fun together at. Other benefits including the employee stock purchase program are comparable to other companies of a similar size and I could never complain about the benefit selection. Training and mentorship is growing though and there are plenty of opportunities to learn new skills and work with people outside your direct job roles. They purchased Linkedin learning for the company to help others learn new skills and that was helpful to many including me. I highly commend them for investing in their employees by getting Learnlux - a financial education system. I thought that was a wonderful idea and I think it's a benefit other companies don't have yet. The management and leadership team is highly empathetic and responsive to the needs of the team members at least in my role. I know it may not be the case in the rest of the company but the leadership team set a good example for me in how to handle problems and face difficult situations with confidence and courage. The diversity and inclusion is growing and getting even better every quarter. It was hard to leave Aaron's because the team is so supportive of each other and I hope other companies could learn from them.
Cons
My salary is kind was low compared to other similar positions in my field. I loved my time working at Aaron's, but I think my salary compared to the complexity of the projects being worked on and the effort of coming up with solutions was not worth it. (i.e. 60+ compared to 70k+ for similar roles elsewhere) They do not match on the HSA which other companies do. I also noticed that the technical debt the organization has: replacing new systems, updating old ones, building new integrations was large compared to the number of engineers and the whole team. Sometimes as an engineer you have to help the business owners understand their own process and how things should actually be done. Sometimes new projects are started with almost no planning or thought into how it should be approached, which team should be involved, and what other things may need to happen. There are still a number of legacy systems and processes at Aaron's that are still in use and sometimes its hard for new engineers to understand them. They are working to phase out stuff but it can be hard sometimes. As an engineer I was often helping figure out what we need to do in a process and how to protect the information instead of writing code to do the process and that was sometimes frustrating for me. I started at Aaron's a year before John Trainor left as CIO and I feel like he did kind of get everyone on board and focused on the objectives we needed to do at any given time. After he left, things have remained the same but I felt like teams became siloed and didn't really talk to each other as much. With Covid and the work from home policy things didn't change for the better to me. The work continued but I think the collaboration and office talk stopped. I always wanted to see roadmaps on what was going on in each team and what their objectives were. I know they started the OKR process which should improve, and I know that will take time to see the results and hope it helps them. I was happy to see roadmaps of what is the most important features we need to be working on in the software systems to do.
