Pros
Only pro was work life balance which is probably why I stayed so long. Managers don't care if you work from home or took off early as long as you got your stuff done and was available online for meetings. To be honest, I rarely worked a full 40 hours a week.
Cons
Honestly, where to start? There's so many things wrong with this company. In no particular order: - Constant restructuring. Organizations get changed multiple times a year. You move your desk multiple times a year. Products get started and canceled all the time. There have been some people working here for over 5 years that have yet to see a project get released due to cancellations and restructurings. - Compensation may be competitive when first joining the company. As time goes on though and you get promoted 1 or 2 times, you will end up being severely underpaid. Ended up with a 33% salary boost after leaving. I was also paid 30k under other people of the same title that had been recently hired. This is definitely a stay 2 years to get a promotion and jump ship company. - Watertown has a very toxic culture. No one there seems to know how to use Google to find solutions to previously solved problems nor does anyone there seems to care about continuing education. I've encountered so many instances of people implementing a horrible library to do something when there is a well used NodeJS/Java/etc library to do the same thing. Responses always were 'didn't know about it!'. Literally a simple Google search would have gotten you the results. Watertown also has a huge problem of just reinventing the wheel in general. Instead of using industry standards or software, they insist on rolling their own. Not only that, but Architects, Managers, etc expect the right now versus doing it right. I've had an Architect argue with my team that he wouldn't support us in getting what we needed because we could have implemented the work in an iFrame. An iFrame? in 2018? Get real man. - Watertown also has a horrible communication problems. If you have to work remotely with them, good luck. I've had to CC managers on emails to developers in Watertown before due to them ignoring Slack messages. - The holy CTO that is Prakash Khot. As previously mentioned, he's a textbook example of a sociopath. He manages to say a lot of stuff in a short amount of time without saying anything meaningful at all. He thinks he's an amazing architect but honestly, the only things he's done is take the company in the logical direction to play catch up with the technology trends while managing to completely rob the company of any morale and culture that we once had. He used last year's layoffs to fire everyone that opposed him and who he didn't like. - Ever since Prakash came on board, the company has slowly lost all the culture and fun it once had. It's now more corporate than ever. - Attrition is also very high. Everyone that's been here for more than 2 years is slowly leaving. The company is losing people faster than it's hiring. For anyone thinking about it, you WILL be replacing someone that left. - The board and upper management don't know how to manage this company. They had a prime opportunity to sell the company at $160 a share which is way over market value. Instead they twiddled their thumbs and ended up selling anyways at $130 a share. Who knows what the restructuring will be like. Likely to be further layoffs.