Pros
The people. The talent acquisition team actually has a knack for finding excellent people, and how they convinced us all to work there for pennies on the dollar will forever be beyond me, but the fact remains, they have a LOT of great people. I still maintain friendships with multiple people I met while working there. FWI pours a lot of heart and money into their culture. This is typically great, although not always(see below)! It’s fun to stop working on Friday at 3 and have beers with your coworkers. Company parties are always a good time.
Cons
PAY. For most positions, FWI pays well below market value. Getting promoted does not always come with a pay raise, and you will have to fight tooth and nail to earn what you deserve. Performance reviews are few and far between. Managers do not keep track of positive things, only complaints, so low or no raises are “justified”. Keep track of your own performance and achievements if you expect them to be acknowledged. BENEFITS. The health benefits are not great. You will have the option of a high deductible plan with HSA or paying a LOT for a minimally more comprehensive plan. 401k exists but with minimal matching. “Unlimited PTO” is a huge draw, but good luck actually getting to take time off if your workload is high (which it almost always will be). CAREER DEVELOPMENT. If you are hoping to grow a career here, know that your success will be based more on your relationships with management and executives than on your performance. You can be a top performer in your department and still be fighting for fair pay and reasonable time off; forget a promotion. WORKLOAD. You will be 120% allocated, working overtime, and picking up half finished projects due to constant turnover. You may be traveling to client sites 60-80% of the time; you will not get comp time for days spent traveling on the weekends or the 60-80 hour weeks you will spend onsite with clients. You will not be paid enough to feel justified in spending 60-80 hours working in a week. It will burn you out. PRODUCT. The software product constantly has new features being added. Projects are often sold based on features that are still in testing phases, or worse have yet to be developed. You will end up working far outside the scope of your job to try and make software features work with stop gap solutions, and you will have to be the face of the company for your frustrated clients. Bugs often take 2-3 software cycles to be resolved (to no fault of the development team who work their tails off trying to keep up with all of the features being sold before they are developed). The product is powerful, and does a lot of cool things, but it doesn’t do any of them perfectly. The core product needs to be overhauled and features need to be better prioritized. Development teams need to be able to have the final say on when a feature will be ready BEFORE it is sold. HUMAN RESOURCES. The HR team at FWi is a joke. Individual privacy is not respected. Anonymous complaints don’t exist, and HR will not intervene on your behalf or advocate for your workplace rights. I’m not even sure they know what your workplace rights are. Sexual harassment complaints are not taken seriously. CULTURE. FWi really values their culture and they work hard to make everything laid back and chill—to a fault. There is a real frat boy bro culture present (not always in a sexist way, but most definitely in a clique-y exclusive way). They offer cross fit and yoga classes, lunch runs, and fresh fruit on Wellness Wednesdays, there are happy hours and Fun Fridays—these things are all very attractive, but they are just a band-aid for the broken culture behind the scenes. Friends of employees (especially managers) are hired over random applicants. Same principle applies to promotions and raises. You can climb the ladder only if you rub elbows with the right people. “Fun” Fridays can be downright unprofessional. Office space becomes mixed use for drinking beer and partying at 3pm on Fridays—if you have actual client work to do you’ll want to book a conference room. Workplace relationships are rampant. People were sleeping with each other all over the board when I worked there. It fosters a lot of gossip which fosters a very unhealthy environment. I don’t think workplace relationships are a problem if kept professional but that definitely wasn’t the case here. PRIORITIES. The priorities of many of the management teams are majorly skewed. Seat time is more valuable than work ethic. This can be a terrible measure of employee performance, yet many managers viewed it as a top priority. If you are an employee who travels a lot for assignments, don’t even think about working from home when you’re in Denver. Seat time is much more heavily rewarded, even when seat time means sticking around on fun Friday to drink with your colleagues after 3pm instead of going home.
