Strongmind - It's what you make of it!
Pros
Being an employee here for several years, I've found that Strongmind (formerly Flipswitch) has always been a place that lets you mold it into what you want of it. Leadership favors the employees that add cultural value and go beyond to make the place a better work environment (what company doesn't like those kind of employees). There is room at Strongmind to come in and work your 8 to 5, but you may not see much internal growth, and may find yourself on the outside of company values. The company is favorable in regards to innovation, new technologies, career growth through learning. The CEO dreams big, so there are a lot of projects that come down to teams for opportunity to innovate and work with cutting edge development tools. The company is financially secure from what I know, and has above average benefits for an IT company. All the necessary medical benefits, 401k (3% match), gym/yoga studio, opportunity to join work leagues (softball/bowling/etc). Leadership does a pretty good job being transparent and goals are communicated well to give a good picture of the company going forward. I always felt that management encourage individuals to bring up concerns for discussion/resolution. The people that work at Strongmind are amazing. They like to have a lot of fun and very genuine group. You can build some very strong relationships with people from every department in the company.
Cons
Although a big portion of the company vision makes sense and most employees can see the value of it (decouple of monolithic applications, lead the market with rich self-authored course content), I do believe implementation for displaying/assessing that content and newly developed application Courseware (formerly CoursePlayer) may have gone in a direction that has brought a lot of concern to internal teams/employees. Deadlines have sped up the development life-cycle and releases have gone out with some issue, and lack of feature parity of legacy CoursePlayer. Communication among-st leadership is still a work in progress. There have been several instances where same-level management has not been aligned with the same short-term decisions/goals. The company has more of a flattened management level, which overall can be a good thing, but comes with some negative. Not a clear path for individual career goals to transition to a management role in most departments (IT/Creative/Curriculum).
