Pros
Without a doubt, this is a very fun place to work. The campus is really cool and never gets old to me, the food is a pretty good bang for your buck considering what a restaurant would charge you. The break rooms are pretty well stocked as well. Training for the first six months covers learning a new (unused elsewhere) programming language and a series of extensive application-specific classes. While challenging and difficult to keep up to date with quarterly upgrades etc, most of the curriculum is very well thought through and put together but numerous PhDs. Very good range of trainers.
Cons
In the TSE role you get thrown into customer service pretty early without a real feeling of preparedness. Training does not simulate well for what you will experience per customer, because 90% of the time any questions that come up will be new to anyone in the organization. My biggest complaint/reservation is that you can work in the role for 5-10 years (and very few people do) and still not know how to solve a problem first glance. The internal documentation system also drives me insane. Anyone and everyone has editing ability, so you could be using outdated or incorrect information about the system without knowing, or have poorly presented information that doesn’t make any sense since there is no proofreading or verification process. Very frustrating if you have limited experience reading technical writing. There’s few engineers or developers who are best-selling writers for a reason. Maybe it’s a millennial problem but I cannot understate how unsatisfying the investigation work is. There’s also a large amount of internal pressure to resolve issues and answer questions with a quick turnaround. Your performance is based on customer satisfaction, how long you take to respond to customers, and internal/external feedback. Annual raises are also performance and tenure based compared to your coworkers, with no direct comp for actual increase in responsibility (team lead, mentor, technical coordinator etc). Any additional role responsibility is essential ‘brownie points’ for your manager’s evaluation of you, and your title will literally always be TSE (no level 1, 2, Sr, etc). Non-compete is pretty strict and annual raises are not disclosed until yearly review, so knowing how to plan for the future is pretty difficult as well. As mentioned the language used is very dated and exclusive to in house operations, giving TS and Devs that look for other employment ‘golden handcuffs’ since there’s limited transferability to most other tech. Bottom line, the role itself just isnt for me. I've heard mixed experiences about being able to switch internal roles, but you'd be resetting your salary to an entry level for that role, so pretty uninteresting.
