Interesting opportunity, but with significant growing pains
Pros
* They have a great mutual respect for each person's skills and abilities. Most people are genuinely interested in your take and are willing to hear you out. * Not as political as other places I've been. Most of the senior management are accessible, and most of them are down-to-earth and approachable. * The team has a start up mentality, even though they've grown in size quite a bit over the last couple years. They're constantly trying to find ways of innovating and disrupting a huge industry. * Most people (in development) have creative freedom to solve complex problems, and the autonomy to tackle things as you see fit. You are generally respected for your approach, and most people give you respect surrounding the products you own. * Free snack food, massages, periodical lunches, and other little perks here and there. * Company culture is really weird and awkward at times, but it's mostly a fun environment. * There seems to be an honest desire to improve the company as time goes on; by establishing company values, improving communication, better benefits, etc. * I had a manager who sincerely cared about me as a person, as well as my career development. He did an exceptional job at managing me while still taking a hands off approach, which I appreciated.
Cons
* Outsourcing all development to India probably makes a certain amount of monetary business sense, but it seriously complicates the ability to create really great products due to communication barriers, time difference, and general misunderstandings due to cultural differences. This creates some problems with product development, and over time contributes to a wildly large and often bloated codebase. * Communication on the timeline and release of products is very poor. Management is always trying to put out fires with specific clients, and because of that, they constantly makes promises that are not aligned with reality. There have been countless times where I have seen upset sales people (because of upset clients), who had been told something would be available, or resolved, when those things were far from being completed. * The culture and relationship with clients has been one of "we'll do whatever we can for you", rather than releasing a product that works for the larger majority of customers. This means that they create products with niche features that please the small minority of clients, while alienating the majority with unncessary bloatware. This also creates a backend settings system that is incredibly complex and convoluted. * The client feedback loop is poor. I had several opportunities to meet with clients in their workplace, and heard a lot of complaints on integration, support, documentation, and more. The vast majority of people I talked with felt like their concerns were not being heard, and even when they were, nothing was done to resolve them. * There is a general unspoken understanding that "okay is good enough" with our product design. Because the industry is behind the curve, both technically and creatively, there are some who feel like the need to create really great products is unnecessary. Okay is better than everyone else, so why try for great? * The CEO is a maverick, wearing a lot of different hats, involved in lots of different things, especially the back-end development for all products. He wears his developer hat first and foremost, which means he has his hands all over the code. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but what makes it unfortunate is that he is the type of person who shoots before aiming. He is a serious believer in establishing a minimal viable product, however a lot of the time "minimal" is simply incomplete. This usually means we're taking one step forward and two steps backwards with every product release because of all the bugs.
