The downsides of this place, though, can be significant - depending on your personality type and expectations. In the end, I think that PROS and I were not well-suited to each other. I was used to environments with high-visibility deliverables and deep user-vendor relationships, where accountability and effectiveness were really important. As such, when I saw processes that didn't work (or places where no process existed at all), I tried to change that. But PROS is not a place where accountability can thrive - I don't mean that as an insult, it's just not that kind of place - and so the pressure I exerted just made everyone uncomfortable. Eventually, I abandoned my efforts, and a while later they abandoned theirs (aka fired me).
While it was a relief to me to not have to fill out .25-hour-increment details on my timesheets like I did at other previous employers, the permissiveness of the company's timekeeping swings all the way into complete disregard. I was never asked to justify anything I put on my timesheet, and management never reviewed anything about our work with us.
Hours weren't the only thing we didn't actually track - despite repeatedly asking for answers to simple questions like "how many customers do we have on this product?" and "what am I supposed to be doing?" I was never able to get much of an idea of what was going on around me. This seemed to be generally a result of a string of reactionary reorganizations and rebrandings that gave a frequent impression that managers were trying to fill dead air with something, anything, as long as it keeps the gears turning.
Honestly, this is probably a pretty common strategy, so I only list it as a negative because in this company's case the absurdity of it was ratcheted up to the point where people around the office make jokes about it constantly. Flyers would appear announcing new initiatives in vague and exciting language, only to be replaced by a new and even more exciting one three months later, with nothing having happened in between.
But hey, it's a technology services company. If you're in this line of work, then all of this stuff is pretty standard. The bustle and irritation, the anxious lack of information, the manufactured culture - OH!
The manufactured culture thing is a particularly funny story. At one all-hands meeting we were, no joke, instructed to "laugh as hard as you can until I tell you to stop." It was an attempt to illustrate that fun work environments start with earnest effort from individual people. You know, the sort of "smile, you'll feel better!" kind of messaging. Except when someone with a microphone is commanding you to be happy, well, it stops being wishy-washy corporate pandering and it starts being something far more totalitarian and frightening. 2016! It's a time when otherwise-rational people actually choose to do this stuff. Go figure.
Anyway, it's all just busy work. I tried really hard to find high-value work while I was there, and I managed to do a couple things. I couldn't really get a handle on how I could be more valuable to them, and when I asked people just got mad. Eventually, I was fired without warning, in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week. I was never informed that I was in danger of losing my job (mid-year reviews "went away" this year), they refused to give me ANY explanation of what was happening, and when they mailed me my belongings, most of them were smashed. What a beautiful coda to a completely confusing experience.
