A few strong employees carrying the weight of poor management decisions
Pros
There are some really awesome and knowledgeable employees. On the whole everyone is friendly and the environment is quite relaxed.
Cons
Developers tend to be an after thought during key business decisions. As a result, several third party systems have been acquired, or contracted out and subsequently dumped on development teams. This is in addition to their own home grown services. The team I was on was responsible for ~50 different services and lambdas across a team of 6 (a Lambda usually doesn't hold much code but they all require runbooks, alarms, pipelines and regular maintenance and thus are a lot of work). In addition to these system acquisitions, developer's often have to do manual onboarding tasks for clients. E.g. any time a client wants to add new parking locations developer's must make manual configuration changes and execute deployments. There are plans in place to reduce this with some work already complete. However, the fact that it has gone on for so many years, speaks to how the company prioritizes the types of projects and work that developers do. The developer roles are advertised as having a strong work life balance, but in reality team members are expected to be on call once every 3 weeks. The oncall workload is not usually high, but is still highly disruptive to weekend plans. Even scheduling vacations around 2 weeks in length require you to negotiate with team members to swap shifts. Upper management is aware of this issue and that it reduces employee retention. However, there appears to be very little being done to actually reduce the amount of oncall. It's all up to the teams.
