Pros
• Retains good engineers (most software engineers are 6+ years at Hologic) • Good Work/Life balance (rarely over 45 hours per week for exempt employees) • Competitive benefits (including retirement vesting & continuing education compensation) • Good middle-management helps keep engineers productive • Focus on people and purpose, which comes naturally • Healthy internship program
Cons
• Understaffed engineering group means the group is susceptible to disturbances (even vacations can cause unexpected issues in workflow) • Despite understaffed group, salaries are moderate • Neglected requirements documents cause major problems for an FDA-regulated group • Bad software culture leans away from Agile and Unit Testing, leading to too much dependence on the competence of individual software engineers • Not enough communication with the end-clients during development leads to decisions in a vacuum • Small size leads to lack of horizontal movement opportunities ("locked in" to a role) • Very informal on-boarding process for new engineers (likely due to the fact that the group rarely hires new engineers, outside of interns), despite the fact that strong domain knowledge is required to function well
