Pros
Preface: I worked here for 2+ years. I had both good and bad experiences, but the bad ones were really, really bad, and the issues that caused them persisted through the company even after moving teams/areas. - Very laid back culture. Almost impossible to get fired unless you are completely incompetent. - Easy to get hired. - Lack of supervision? (pro for you, con because coworkers can abuse and cause you more work) - You can pretty much do whatever you want. - Easy to move teams/positions within company. - Great place to make friends. - Good in-between jobs job because it's not a good place to grow your career but the work is easy and responsibilities are relatively low (assuming you're a good programmer and don't struggle with basic tasks). - 401K match is good. - Benefits are decent.
Cons
- Management is practically non-existent for many teams, which might seem good at first (allows you to do your work without micromanagement) but problems that require managerial support will start to stack up after a while and things will grind to a halt until they get sorted out (months later). - Due to lower than industry standard wages and easy interview process, be prepared to work with many sub-par programmers, horribly written/tested code, and an intersourcing/testing process that will take 3x longer than actually writing the code. - Depending on what team you are on, on-call responsibilities can vary widely. Due to poor code architecture/testing and legacy code that's being held together with metaphorical duct tape, many teams are playing a game of KTLO (keep the lights on) and are in a constant scramble to keep systems up and running, leaving them no time to work on anything interesting or new during support rotations and being awoken in the middle of the night by emergency code-malfunction calls. - Low pay, as mentioned previously. - Managers/project leaders/architects are untouchable, even if they are misbehaving (harassment, manipulation, etc). The offending party will not be reprimanded/fired no matter how many people complain about them because they are too understaffed to lose managers, even horrible ones. - Slow. Slow slow slow slow. Nothing really gets done. Projects will drag out forever and ever and ever and ever because no one seems to have the ability to make decisions. - Slim to no mentorship or support for newbies. As I was told 'It's trial by fire here' and 'Welcome to team. It's time to sink or swim' - There is no recognition for successes, big or small. - There is, however, plenty of finger pointing for team failures. Because getting promoted is so difficult and every error so scrutinized, no one is willing to take the blame for their mistakes for fear it could stagnant their career for years. - There's a list of about 100 things you need to do nearly perfectly every year to be considered for promotion. It's up to your manager how tightly he/she wants to hold you to that. If they want to hold on tightly to that list, promotion will take a long, long time, no matter how hard you work because so many things on the list aren't in your day-to-day responsibilities. - Passionate developers are going to get frustrated quickly by the ridiculously slow process and coworkers who drag down code quality. - Lots of office gossip/drama. - No one cares about your code. Literally. No one will ever look at it until it needs to be updated. Your manager and coworkers will NEVER actually look at anything you produce to measure your value. You cannot prove your worth through code. You must make friends and then beg them to voluntarily submit a review to help you get a promotion, but that might not be taken into consideration either. It's mostly up to your manager and whether or not they want to promote you. If they do, they will find reasons to, and if they don't, they will find any reason not to (I'm not just speaking from my perspective but others' testimony as well). - Don't rock the boat. They will tell you to speak up but it's a trap. It's not a safe space to ask questions. - In the EP IT building, there is NO space. You will be stuffed into their one IT building like a can of sardines. Lots of illnesses going around all the time and working from home (even occasionally) will get you a frowny face on your company file (WFH is only allowed in special cases). I'm pretty sure they're breaking fire code with too many people in the building. - As mentioned above, generally no remote work is allowed (only if you're really sick or weather is unreasonable to attempt to reach the office). On average, if you WFH more than one day every few months, you're going to get in trouble for it (in my experience). And don't even think about taking a day (or half day) off without at least a week's notice. It really doesn't matter what your reason is (medical, family, etc). If it's not a true emergency, there's no case where you can take a spontaneous day off (using your given PTO and even considering you have 0 meetings/responsibility that day). - No sick days. Use PTO for that (because the crowded office makes you sick all the time).
