Pros
Lots of hands on learning. Remote work. The actual work is interesting and engaging if you can look past the issues of this job.
Cons
Management either extremely micromanages or doesn’t care about the MANAGEMENT part of their job at all. Even if you’re lucky and your direct manager actually cares, because of the way projects are assigned, you will be exposed to all of the bad managers at some point. Feedback is provided rarely and is inconsistent. Positive feedback is quite surface level (pretty much just “keep up the good work”) and negative feedback is not constructive and delivered with hostility. Managers seem to prefer waiting for an issue to grow into a problem that you don’t even know about before stepping in and telling you that you’ve been doing your job wrong the entire time, instead of being helpful at the first mistake and providing guidance. Training is almost entirely self guided and opportunities for development after your probation period are extremely limited. Junior employees are expected to be overly communicative, constantly checking in with others, asking questions frequently but also don’t ask too many questions, ask for tasks to do but also don’t ask for too many things to do or else look like you don’t know what’s going on. The result is feeling like you’ve been left to your own devices and having difficulty knowing what to prioritize. Senior employees seem to be held to a different, lower standard. Workload distribution is extremely unbalanced, despite what management claims. The same employees seem to get assigned to the larger, more complex projects where they’re constantly bogged down with work while other employees always seem to get assigned to smaller projects where they can go weeks at a time having very little to do. Culture overall is pretty toxic. There is an unspoken expectation that employees should be working unpaid overtime. Weekend work, late nights, and early mornings are common. This even goes as far as working through vacations or while sick. There is no appreciation for any of this. Anyone who attempts to have work life balance is frowned upon. An “inner circle” definitely exists here, and you will know if you are not in it. Employees are incentivized to throw each other under the bus. Managers spend as much time during one on ones talking about you as they do trying to get you to snitch on your coworkers. Because your work is reviewed by your peers, it is not uncommon to see employees taking more credit for work or correcting mistakes without providing any feedback to help their coworkers. If you can survive a full year here, you will be welcome to this inner circle. Because HR is so small, they are effectively powerless to do anything about any of these issues or simply don’t want to.