Excellent Work-Life Balance, Good Industry Practices
Pros
The work-life balance here was great, no crunch, and timelines were always realistic in my experience. In times that required me or others to go above and beyond, my manager would always make a point to recognize the hard work. The engineering side of things is run very well, and despite being a 50+ year old company, the development practices and choices in technology/tools were very modern whenever they could be. This alone was a huge plus, compared to companies that have piles of tech debt and no plan to deal with it. While I worked here there were several initiatives to standardize code style, adopt version control, refactor old codebases, migrate to favored programming languages, etc. My coworkers were very knowledgeable and competent, I had a great boss, and I was perfectly satisfied with my day-to-day work. Pittsburgh is also a beautiful and underrated city.
Cons
Company culture. Not that it's bad, but there isn't much of one. Individually, everyone is friendly and helpful, and I never met a person at ISI that I didn't like. Collectively however, there isn't much that would make people feel a shared identity. This became very apparent after Covid when it seemed a struggle to get people back into the office, which fwiw is a beige time capsule with few open/common areas. Despite not being a large company, it's hard to get a picture of the whole and to get to know those you're not directly working with. I would have liked to be able to collaborate with those on my team more, but the team size didn't often call for it. Pay and benefits were okay.
