Pros
Culture at rewardStyle is a premium. However with culture leaving out the door and much being forgotten with time, I fear we are a few mandates away from losing the things that make people happy to come to their jobs. A relaxed atmosphere (casual drinking) and flexible hours are what set us apart from the stuffy boring 9 to 5's. We have a couple of excellent managers that deserve a lot of credit for keeping their teams intact (look at who isn’t losing people). Much of the solutioning and actual work for development is left up to the developer themselves, to learn and make mistakes as they grow under said excellent managers. There are a handful of passionate people left that want to do good work and are willing to set aside their egos to take meaningful feedback. Product has been much more patient about deadlines. Unfortunately this could also change as the putting out fires and priority switching lately gives the appearance of not delivering to a defined road map. I think the CEO will eventually grow restless of the constant updates to estimated dates and not understand the context.
Cons
Product: The product team has been working to smooth out it’s process and gain more influence over the business. Unfortunately their ultimate concern is with delivering the hottest features and circle jerking road maps. It will be impossible for these people to have a consistent vision for the future without understanding what our core competencies actually are. They have given important products to under qualified team members and promoted incompetence. Entire teams have left because of a product owner, but there has been no response. Engineering is tired of last minute fires and reactionary demands. Advice: Leave your bubble and challenge yourself Engineering: By and large the complaints you will see here are from engineers. They would have you think their Google tier skills are compromised by a toxic and constantly changing environment. While it may be a system where agile and road maps are abused and dictated, these snowflakes fail to mention that they can’t deliver basic CRUD apps or data pipelines without turning it into an over-complicated stack nightmare. There needs to be a discussion on what MVP actually means, and it’s not composing your entire stack or spending months of company time to build out your heavily nuanced deployment system. There are many over titled engineers and some are leaving the company to find out the hard way where they actually stand. Advice: Walk the walk Leadership: Politics has infested the company with the regime change from last year and with no oversight to the games being played the landscape is changing. Power and leverage is being brought in from all sides and winners are already being picked. Dead projects from dank citizens are being resuscitated as big wins for people who get to “deliver”. This favoritism won’t be unnoticed and hasn’t been. By the time you get done rewarding these people your actual 20% doing 80% won’t settle for a title bump, or wait around for a benefits overhaul. Who fires someone on Christmas? Advice: Show where your loyalties lie