Pros
The people are generally great to work with. For the most part they care about the quality of their work and want the company to be successful. Their are opportunities to be innovative within a very rigid development process. The leadership team holds regular town hall meetings to communicate with employees. In Dayton, they have partnered with both the University of Dayton and Wright State University to provide employees the opportunity to get their MBA at a substantially reduced cost while working full-time. Good PTO. Commitment to the community and charitable activities, providing each employee 2 days/year to volunteer.
Cons
The numbers reported are all smoke and mirrors. 1% revenue growth and 7% profit only happens by slashing expenses (i.e. employees). For management to stand up and claim that despite employees living in a constant state of fear of losing their jobs the company is actually +4 full-time employees year to date is very disingenuous. The new employees are all unqualified offshore employees that get paid a fraction of a US based employee. There is a running bet every year about when the travel budget will be eliminated. It didn't make it out of the second quarter this year. The company used to allow home-based employees, but has moved away from that concept in recent years, in some instances forcing employees to move to a new city to an office location or give up their jobs. Now employees are being forced into being home-based 1/2 the time. One of the 6 buildings on the Dayton campus has been evacuated so it can be leased out to a new tenant. Those employees were forced into other buildings and into cube sharing arrangements in cubicles not capable of having more than one person in them at a time. The result is working from home 2-3 days a week, which could be a good thing, but it also means you really have no personal space at the office. Nobody I know is happy with the cube sharing arrangement. Company puts a lot of effort into being "innovative," but is largely ineffective in bringing real change to the market. Instead, it's sweet spot seems to be reacting to the market leader and trying to duplicate its innovations. There is a tendency to over-engineer the product, building in bells and whistles that look cool but don't provide much actual value. The core research platform does not perform up to expectations. The initial release was completely driven by the architects, not the customers and internal product experts. Since that initial release, there has been a significant shift to a customer-focused development model, but there is still too much effort expended to remediate issues that have been around since the initial platform launch.
