The culture is tough. There is a very pervasive culture of selling your soul for completely unimportant and arbitrary deadlines. The work life balance is very hard to keep (depending on the team). Everything is always so urgent and a very high priority. Processes are significantly underbaked and that leads to issues a lot of the time. There is also organizational issues that plague how priorities are communicated. Effort in a lot of areas is underappreciated and sometimes resisted. Channels of communication between the product management, business, and development side of the shop are not standardized, you will receive the same request with different parameters and varying priorities based on who you talk to. I only have a few data points (my own and others) to work with, but since the PE acquisition raises are measly, and I suspect it will not get a whole lot better. Recognizing exceptional effort is not standardized and rarely happens. As a developer generally this is not the greatest environment to thrive as a developer, the expectations are unreasonable (not from direct managers but from the business and culture), there is a reluctance to deal with institutional and technical debt. The turnover is relatively high, so I would consider Ascend for 1-2 year stint if you are trying to learn about, build skills, or develop domain expertise in the energy sector but I wouldn't consider it a place to want to stay long term. Oh and don't get me started on how there wasn't a competent HR department for a solid 6 months, I had a tax issue that I flagged in November and it got resolved in January.
