Pros
The people are the best part of this job, far and away. I love my coworkers. The combination of library and computer backgrounds makes for an amazing bunch. Since we got bought by the larger company, a lot has changed - there are a lot of new faces as they hire new people here instead of in California where they'd have to pay them more, and many great people either left or were laid off. But the team we have here and even middle management are really solid characters. I feel like they have my back and commiserate with our issues. I love my work. It's interesting, it's engaging, it's challenging.
Cons
Yeah, it's clearly obvious that once private equity happens, the new goal is not customer satisfaction or quality products but the bottom line. That's not revolutionary news, it's just an inescapable reality. Middle management is totally on board with us, but it's easy to see that upper management are not playing the same game at all. There is a major divide in interests. Again, I'm not saying anything shocking here, this is business as usual. We all come to work every day knowing this, and we do make the best of it, and we like our work, when we can concentrate on doing it. As a smaller company we sometimes got a bonus, but even in lean times we got a gift card to our local grocery stores for Christmas. Our old president really, genuinely cared about each and every one of us, and that was apparent at all times. The first year we were owned by the larger company... we got a water bottle. We were promised our benefits would be the same or better after the acquisition, and then from the sound of it, upper management was genuinely surprised at all the benefits we had. Those went bye-bye. Sure, health insurance just gets worse year by year everywhere, but our fringe benefits tanked. Remember this: a company will never implement a policy that doesn't directly benefit it. Unlimited PTO sounds fantastic: you're no longer limited to just this many days! Take as many as you need! But what it really means is that you no longer "own" your vacation days. If you don't use them, they don't roll over, they evaporate. You will never be reimbursed for the ones you don't use when you leave. You are always beholden to your superiors for final approval for each day - there's no end-of-year "these days are owed to me, so I need to take them." To use a library metaphor, it's like going from ownership to a license model: it's sold to you as an improvement, but all it means is that you no longer have something that's yours. There are always strings.
