Pros
A ping pong table! Great mix of company social events - weekly drinks, picnics, cooking classes, parties, paint ball, mini golf, etc. Good kitchen facilities with free fruit, snacks and coffee. Opportunities to volunteer and provide benefit to the local community. There are some great people here amongst the weeds - friendly, professional, experienced and dependable. There are a range of interesting projects being run across the company and it is a great way to get exposure to how business is run across different industries. A diverse range of nationalities and cultures are represented across most departments.
Cons
Management is very cliquey and values/promotes people they like rather than based on skills/experience. Consequently this breeds similar behavior within the general staff pool and company professionalism suffers as a result. Many management positions have been filled by people who have no skills at managing people or processes which affects the company negatively as a whole. Velir has a lack of adequate systems/process training across most departments. It is not unusual to find people who have been working here for months who still don't know how to do their jobs or how to do things internally within the business. Each department is effectively siloed from each other by design and this ultimately affects work effectiveness and productivity. Even within departments it's hard to learn from your peers because of a general lack of systematic knowledge sharing or peer growth programs. Velir struggles with project estimation, planning and management generally which is confusing based on it being a core element of it's industry and the length of time that this company has been in business. Performance reviews here are convoluted, confusing and lack any real integration with developmental progress. Peer reviews end up being more like a popularity contest or a way for people to express personal grievances than anything meaningful. Practically speaking, the lack of growth management at Velir has impacted the general availability of meeting rooms and the building is always experiencing problems with maintaining consistent temperatures from it's air conditioning across most seasons.
