Pros
A high-energy work environment, profit sharing, great food at an affordable price, caring co-workers, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your work truly benefits everyone in America.
Cons
A monumental level of importance is placed on procedures. There are many dogmas at work in Ramsey's technological departments, and they all serve to cripple the productivity of their product engineering (i.e., software development) teams. It's difficult to explain, but Ramsey is one of those companies that thinks they have software down to such a science that they are above the established wisdom of the software engineering industry. They believe there is a right way and a million wrong ways of doing software development, and I'll give you one guess as to whose way is correct. Imagine a company completely free of bureaucracy, able to forge an efficient path forward in their software engineering endeavors, unhampered by regulations from the government, banks, healthcare, etc., but instead of capitalizing on their incredible gift of freedom, they choose to shackle themselves with more policies and procedures than I ever experienced working for the government. Management rewards those who recite their daily profession of faith in Kanban, strong static typing, "ideation" (a term I have grown to loath to such an extent I cannot speak it aloud), excessive numbers of planning meetings, and ADRs (architectural design records, or as I like to call them, a complete waste of time and effort, but more on them later). I cannot tell you how many times I have put forth a small merge request (perhaps 40 lines changed), and have had it stalled in code review for a period of days until it reached the sprawling length of 200 or more lines changed, with the additional changes accomplishing nothing other than arbitrary refactorings that in no way improve the quality of the codebase, along with the obligatory ADR. Oh my, ADRs. Before coming to Ramsey I had never heard of an ADR, and now I can see why. ADRs are essentially long-winded recaps of software design meetings, outlining the primary problem under study, the decisions weighed, and the solution accepted. If this sounds useful to you, it's not. Because we were all expected to produce them on a regular basis, most ADRs were quickly and sloppily thrown together, and all of them found their way into a networked folder that no one ever bothered curating. No one ever referenced our ADRs once they were written, either. Trying to find anything useful in that mess would be like trying to untangle the Gordian Knot. Thus, ADRs assumed the status of a report, a piece of paperwork we had to complete any time we added a new feature to our relatively small codebase. The more I think about why on earth why on earth we suffered from such a massive degree of micromanagement, the more I fixated on the word "management." Ramsey is a company that lives and dies by its middle management. Each software product team is about 40% managers: product managers, project managers (there is a difference), technical leads, technical managers, marketing managers, business leads, and more. Every day I spent about 50% of my day reporting to my myriad managers. Trying to find a blessed moment to program the very thing I was hired to develop was incredibly difficult. Many of these men and women were nice enough, but their job revolved around the act of not trusting their software developers. They requested updates, in about four different written forms, every single day: JIRA updates, Microsoft Teams updates, updates on GitHub (yes, our managers actually read our GitHub PRs and demanded we make changes to our PR descriptions), email updates, and our big weekly report. If you have not yet grown to fear the productivity paralysis that comes with a glut of middle managers lording over you each and every moment of the day, spend a year at Ramsey. Nothing will make you want to never work for a corporation again like the pain and suffering of not being able to concentrate for 2 minutes straight without an interruption from a manager. The last topic I want to touch on is their professed "work-life balance." It's in their core values (well, the value is called "Family," but same diff). Ramsey prides itself on allowing its employees ample time to spend with their families, as opposed to making its employees work overtime and depriving them of the most valuable thing this life has to offer: time with loved ones. However, in my experience, Ramsey's work culture was exactly the opposite. No one on my team worked less than nine hours a day, many exceeding 10. It was not uncommon for software developers to get to work at 6:30 in the morning and stay until 5:00 PM. I liked the typical 9-6 work schedule, but I quickly learned this was not acceptable to Ramsey. I was expected to be at work no later than 8:00 AM (although I was promised a flexible start time by my recruiter, probably the most boldfaced lie I was sold by the company), and if I left before 5:30 I would be questioned, KGB style. "Are you happy here? You seem to be leaving work early. Is there some reason you don't want to come in when everyone else does?" It was creepy, to say the least, and outright manipulative at worst. I would go as far as to say that at Ramsey you are not allowed to be a normal professional, and I honestly don't think they would be upset by me saying that. I mean that employees are not valued for their productivity. They are valued based on arbitrary metrics the company has devised for assessing their employees' merit. These include but are not limited to: how late they are willing to work, how many company functions they attend on a regular basis, how many jokes they tell at work, how many times they interrupt meetings (and by this I mean that Ramsey actually wants their employees to disrupt meetings, and if you don't they don't believe that you're engaged with the topic at hand), how high their D on their DISC test is (look it up, it's like Strengths Finder for idiots), and how many corporate platitudes they recite on a regular basis. You cannot come and go gently. If you devised the most ingenious software solution the company had ever seen, but you had less than 5 years invested at Ramsey and did not say enough hail Daves every day, you would be brushed aside as a loser. Ramsey is all about politics, and many software professionals will not enjoy the act of playing them.
