Pros
GoDaddy was an exciting place to work. The benefits (vacations, medical, etc) were among the best of any company in the nation. I got an MSDN account. The pay was very competitive. The Christmas party was always spectacular. And in my team's case the quarterly team bonding experience was pretty nice. Most of the more general organizational facets of the company such as the HR orientation process, IT getting software installed, and having a system of collaboration were pretty solid. Celebrating its successes, GoDaddy was full of surprises. One time they even brought a marching band to stomp through the offices while we were working.
Cons
All the pros don't make up for how frustrating the experience was for me as a developer. The company grew a few years ago very, very fast, so people who had no business being in senior management--some of whom were incredibly crass in demeanor and somehow that looked good on them to the top brass--ended up in senior management, and people who were already in senior management likewise had their egos stroked in seeing the company explode in success those years ago. Technical executives had very little technical understanding of the technical decisions they regularly made. There seemed to be little appreciation among the leadership for practicing humility. One week I sat in a room adjacent to a very senior technical executive and he would be yelling cuss words at the top of his lungs all day long, apparently in "conversations" with people on the phone. We had desktop computers, no laptops, as we were adamantly discouraged from taking our work home (although we could remote in from our personal computers at home at night). The internal enforcement of security was an absolute nightmare, probably the worst part of the experience of working there. I couldn't even so much as check for current drivers for my computer on Dell's web site without the head of security e-mailing me asking me what the heck I was doing on Dell's FTP server. Social networks like Facebook were banned, any attempts to try to access caused an alert to a senior manager. Visiting the call center with an iPad or other laptop/tablet device in hand would get me stopped at the door as some security jerk would start yelling at me red-faced for attempting to enter the call center with such a device in hand, even though I was entering to meet with individuals who were going to be working with me to develop software for said device. All outgoing e-mails even to HR were closely monitored by my own boss. The amount of red tape and waiting involved in setting up servers and the impossibility of arranging for a debugging environment that more than slightly approximates just one of the production servers made it impossible to produce a stable product. I had to beg for many months, well over a year, to upgrade my workstation computer from Windows XP, even as we were developing locally but deploying the product to Windows Server 2008 (at the time). Bugs we had triaged were piling up but every time a new set of bugs were found by customer service *those* bugs ended up taking priority. Older bugs rarely got fixed and architectural design flaws that created so many bugs to begin with couldn't be readily addressed. Refactoring was completely disallowed; the biases of QA managed the development decisions and not the other way around. Egos both among senior management and among developers who had seniority was overwhelming; one group of developers had a hissy fit that our team was not using their several years old, home-grown, undocumented data architecture, built for another time and even under an old abandoned company name. The usual rules of brown-nosing and very long term seniority were the only means to see the hope of climbing a ladder. Most people who were actually "senior" were employees before the company's big boom, and that was it, no more promotions to be had, promotion is not measured on whether you know your stuff and/or can lead well but rather whether you were there in those early days and/or you kiss up well. Most leadership role opportunities were made by someone being promoted or fired and were usually filled by in-house candidates on the basis of being "yes men".
