Decent Tech Company With Great Work Flexibility
Pros
- Work/life balance is great because working from home is widely accepted and technology is in place to make it work very smoothly. Working hours are pretty flexible too. I'm sure this depends on team and role (customer-facing roles have more commitments and such). - Culture is relaxed. Dress code is casual. Gatherings, parties, events, random food treats are common. - Newer projects are using modern technologies and tackling some interesting problems. - I feel like I have job security since the company is doing well. - Pay is decent for what I do, although I needed to really ask for it.
Cons
- Billable time in Services. In my opinion this is a legitimate conflict of interest. We are not motivated to get stuff done quick, fast, and improve for next time, because hey, no matter how long it takes we can bill all the way! - Health insurance seems expensive, although to be fair I'm not up to date on what's competitive. I pay over $6,000 a year (employee+spouse) out of pocket before insurance covers anything other than a yearly checkup and flu shot. Keeps rising each year too. With company financial success I think core benefits should improve, not get more expensive! - A lot of the new projects are using modern technologies, but most of the existing customers are still using outdated tech. So, if you are on a team doing new stuff it's pretty cool, but if you end up supporting the old stuff it's a lot less fun, and for a developer not very good for advancing in-demand career skills. - Software teams are usually led by non-technical or low tech people. This can be ok, but in my experience here it's less than ideal. The managers don't know enough about how the software works to at least explain enough of the business needs for the developers to take over, so we rely too much on the developers knowing the business stuff themselves. That can be fine but it's less efficient. - There is friction/inefficiency/incompetence in the cooperation among divisions of the company (product/services/cloud ops) and it has made little to no progress over the years. - There is a lot of tribal knowledge that isn't spread around enough or put it a safe place. There are ~5-10 tech people at the company that house a scary amount of knowledge and know-how in their head, such that if they left, I'd be very worried.. - The company is growing, so change is understandable, but the team structures change so often that it's weird and makes me lack confidence in the leadership. They seem to think it's all about top-down changes, changing management structure, but they don't invest as much in bottom-up employee & team improvements. The changes always seem to involve more management positions and layers of management, and conveniently for them better-sounding titles for managers. They make fewer serious improvements to hiring more workers with more skills, staffing products and projects with competent people, making functioning systems of support, or making sure knowledge isn't siloed.
