Pros
- The work life balance is generally pretty good. - Starting salary is pretty good. - Great if you love drinking and generally being involved in a more "laddish" culture. - As the company is growing, the employees are becoming more diverse, culturally and technically. You're likely to find a group of people who you get along with. - Ample travel opportunities.
Cons
- Some managers demand very strict rules on work hours, there is sometimes an unspoken rule to work longer hours than is necessary, even when there is no deadline for any deliverables. This creates a negative atmosphere where employees sometimes feel like they need to stay late for the sake of staying late. - The culture on certain project teams is very cliquey/homogeneous, and they will definitely make you feel like an outsider if you do not fit into the "accepted" persona, I'd go as far to say that certain project teams are outright intolerant of differences, however minor or irrelevant they are to the job - There is a VERY heavy blame culture within the company, employees often get thrown under a bus for breaking build plans which is NORMAL for any software development process often because of internal reputation of a project team. This puts developers under a lot of pressure and discourages pragmatism and encourages developers to not take responsibility - Promotions and pay reviews depend only on the opinion of your reviewer, who is often your manager, ineffective/demotivating managers will hinder career progress - Bad decisions made by management often cause a huge amount of pain for developers, who will ultimately get the blame for exceeding the allocated budget allocated to a task - Salary does not scale very well as career progresses
