Pros
1. My coworkers were pretty great. 2. I was paid. 3. Management was absolutely open to exploring new technology but see #1 in the cons section as to why this wasn't feasible most of the time.
Cons
So many things to improve on here but the dept is too "fast paced" to do so. To an experienced developer, the term "fast paced" means exactly what you think it does here. 1. The processes are non-existent and can't exist due to the impossible deadlines placed on tasks by upper management. Projects that would take months to do in a highly effective environment are rushed to be done within a couple of weeks here. This has led to an infinite amount of technical debt and orphaned codebases/database objects. Maintaining or extending anything without completely ripping out parts of the code is near impossible. A 15 minute task can take 3 days. 2. Less than 1% of 1% of the projects have unit testing or best practices implemented. CI/CD doesn't exist here and most deployments are spent fixing the bugs that were just pushed into production. 3. QA is usually given a day or two before something is deployed and that's being generous. Not nearly enough emphasis is being placed on QA by management. 4. Everything is priority and due yesterday. Be prepared to become a professional juggler as priorities change almost daily. Also, these priorities are just new projects. Be prepared to throw quite a bit of production hot fixes on top of that. 5. You will be assigned tasks in person, through emails, through an IM, through a comment in JIRA, and through a task assigned in JIRA. These are far too many workflows to be efficient and effective. 6. Scope creep happens way too often and on far too grand of a scale and is a direct product of #1. 7. Developers are consistently held accountable for becoming a product of an inefficient dept due to how "fast paced" and understaffed it is. 8. Large projects are given to junior level developers with the expectation of senior level work. This is not setting people up your employees to become successful. Non-tech items: 1. The benefits are subpar compared to what I've experienced in the past.