Good place. But not so much challenging work.
Pros
> The work culture of Portware is the biggest pro. All the employees (talking about India office) are diverse, friendly and professional. Office decorations and parties, celebrations every month and for special occasions, team outings for lunches and indoor sports, etc happen often and are a lot of fun. > Flexible timings. You are supposed to work for 8 hours a day. Include an hour of lunch time, you stay for 9 hours in the office. No one really bothers at what time you come and go as long as you get the work done, spend more or less 9 hrs in office, and don't skip important meetings. > Very convenient HR and leave policies. Can work from home for 12 days a year. Can extend that for exceptional cases. > Flexible hierarchy, There is no rigid reporting structure. Although for facilitating the implementation of Agile model, they follow some structure. For any important issue, an entry level developer can even directly call up the CTO and keep the concerned people in the loop. > Appraisal. Appraisals happen half-yearly and is a great opportunity to get a hike twice in an year. > Free refreshments (tea, coffee, soft drinks, fruit juices) and snack on demand (paid) available. Can order breakfast/lunch/dinner and get it delivered to the office. If you had to stay in the office late in the night, you get free dinner and a ride home.
Cons
> Frankly speaking, Portware is a great place if you are in your early-mid career and are wanting to settle down in a company. Great job security. Good policies. But it is not a great place if you are starting your career and are still in the 'exploring & experimenting' stage. There is not much to learn in the development profile. All you work on is Core Java, basic SQL, some java networking APIs, JMS, RMI, and Swings. That's all. It is not so much challenging and interesting. Basically, there won't be much to talk about in your next interview after you exit Portware. > The entire workflow is more of a client driven rather than company driven. Portware respects whatever the client reasonably demands and make different customizations for different client projects. Hence the product they sell is very different in different projects. Either they create several branches for several clients or modify previous client projects and make a generic code for all of them. As a result, there is gigantic code base which is never bothered for a clean-up or restructuring. > There often seems to be a gap in the expectation of use cases between different personnel in the team, due to inadequate planning and use-case analysis. The product manager, delivery manager, develoment manager, the developer and the QA, more often than not, have different expectations on a feature and it leads to a slight miscommunication down the line in that order. And it leads to bugs and production issue when deployed. > Due to frequently working on production and bug issues, developers usually feel under-utilized. But implementing features and developing APIs is challenging and enthusing.
