Good people, bad management, beware clients.
Pros
Great learning experience Great people Interesting projects (if you get assigned to them) Nice soft perks
Cons
Customer service is terrible. The philosophy is for T&M projects, come as close to the estimated price as possible, and charge everything to clients. For fixed projects, cut corners and spend as little time as possible to maximize profit. Nobody really knows how long something takes. The need for a scope at the beginning of each project is terrible, sometimes it takes weeks to write them and more often than not, jeopardizes the clients release timeline. Process is completely waterfall welcome to 1990. Most scopes are horribly written and estimates are not accurate. Sales doesn't talk to development. Once a project is sold, a whole new team starts over. If the project involves ux, the designers will work on it for weeks and what comes out is usually double or triple the original bid. There are no mechanisms in place to do any checks or balances. Resourcing is shameful. A select few project managers (who are in the clique) will have their pick of their developers that they deem good and will even trick the system to add fake work orders for them to keep them seemingly occupied. Developers who get labelled as "bad" or "hard to work with" doesn't get let go, they are either on the bench or they are assigned to projects run by new project managers and set up to fail. The success or failure of a project is entirely determined by the project manager or lead developer assigned. This causes a rift in the sales and development departments and creates the cliquish nature. Projects are more often than not, underestimated, with the knowledge that once you are in, you really can't back out without some kind of loss, so you negotiate over features that are described very loosely by the badly written scope and it's generally a very bad experience. The return rate of clients is abysmal. Many agencies have the nerdery on their black list. This is why the sales department has around 60-70 people at its peak because sales management believes it's easy to ride the good branding the nerdery has achieved and get new clients instead of spending time to make them happy and retain them. After working on many projects you start feeling that what you are taught, the process, and the treatment of clients is highly unethical and the company only has it's bottom line and interest at heart at the expense of clients and the employees.
