Pros
Good people, promising technology that is doing well in the marketplace. CEO has excellent leadership qualities (although see my comments below). The company has great potential. There are some bright spots. There are some good managers and I happen to work with one of the best. Some great people to work with as well.
Cons
The CEO is a strong leader, but it's obvious that he is very marketing/sales focused. The CFO has an engineering degree, but is too focused on cost containment and the "next quarter" at the moment. Both are strong leaders and I suspect that is why there is so much technical debt. The technical leadership at the executive level needs balls and vision to address some of the technical and people issues (and say "no" to new feature requests once in awhile for example). There is no real ground breaking research taking place to my knowledge. There are opportunities for advancing the state of the art, but no will to do so. Most would be longer term and negatively impact next quarter, so it gets ignored. HR is a joke. Benefits are mediocre. Company "culture" needs some work. No training budget. Silos. Lots of silos and it can be difficult communicating across teams. Knowledge transfer and documentation needs work. Much of the documentation is so old that it's totally irrelevant and only confuses the poor reader. The technology side needs a full time technical writer that can turn the wikis into something that's actually usable. Knowledge transfer across teams should be encouraged. Lots of firefighting going on and never enough time for long range fire prevention. Since many of the products existed as separate companies before, there are too many different ways of doing the same thing. Version control? Sure, we have several different ways etc. Scaling and automation issues. It's time for some real systems engineering and strategy rather than poking at the problems with a stick.
