Pros
- Open work from home policy - Flexible work hours - Expectations of what can be done are flexible, mainly due to how difficult mundane tasks become due to the existing system. - Free lunches once a week, with free soda - People are generally friendly at each location
Cons
- The work revolves around a large amount of maintenance, which stifles design of new features. Maintenance work is poorly managed, and constant requests for updates makes for a stressful atmosphere. - Lack of expertise in key areas. People hired often don't have training in the area that they are hired for, or have been moved into an area where they are not effective. It appears that management thinks this will lead to innovation, but it tends to lead to people learning only how to deal with the existing system. - Low interest in innovation, in both design technique and tools. This means that you'll be doing work the hard way, and it's unlikely that a better way will be adopted. Employees that do attempt to train fellow employees on technology issues are not given enough time to prepare, and therefore can show incomplete, or even wrong information. - Favoritism, both in benefits and whether a person's input is listened to. This especially depends on location, as the teams are not treated equally. - Politics play a large part of getting things done, even though it's a fairly small company. Emotions run hot, and heavily influence decisions. Also, an idea will be shot down when it's brought up by someone lower in the company hierarchy, then embraced a few weeks later when it's brought up by upper management. - Communication is low between different teams. This leads to people being left out of meetings they need to be at, issues not being found, and frustration between remote teams. Often emails are unanswered for days, if they are even answered at all. - Time management is non-existent. Releases take much to long (can eat up an entire weekend), and it's not uncommon to have to work at night to do maintenance fixes. Meetings often take up more time than is necessary, largely due to little preparation being done before hand.
