Pros
The company at the time consisted of one large flagship product that had been in development sense 2011 along with multiple side initiatives that were tied in. My role along with many others was to maintain over 800 thousand lines of code written by many people and changed by many more. We worked with multiple languages, mostly dated standards and very little framework utilization. This meant an extremely difficult ball of mud to interpret. The pro with this was that everyone understood its difficulty and it was almost found comically painful to deal with. That transparency was important to manage expectations. The expectations of me never felt to be much. My work ethic was and always has been intensive but I found the pressure of work to be almost non existent here. The guilt of being stuck on a bug for 2 weeks would be met with an understanding giggle about how complex the feature set was and an offer of assistance which I always appreciated. My team was top notch. The seniors here taught me lessons I'll carry with me for the rest of my life. Did I have the responsibilities needed to grow ? No, the company at the time moved at a snails pace but my role allowed me the time to 1. Cope with all the changes that covid brought on without being worked to death in the middle of it all. 2. Find the wlb needed to for my family 3. Be happy. For a developer that is wanting a decent WLB, they will likely find it here. You may or may not get the important responsibilities here but regardless, you will likely find the role non-intensive.
Cons
The cons are: Volatile company & layoff culture: Cirrus makes no hesitation to do size-able layoffs. One week after I joined in 2019 (prior to covid economy) they had layed off more people then I can remember. The developer I had joined alongside was one of them. The CEO alongside Clovis VC gave a speech as to how difficult of a decision this was but I was told there were layoffs just years prior. Im looking through linkedin now (2023) at some of the most talented people with highest tenure at cirrus that are posting about their most recent layoff. This comes to no surprise. If there is any hint of economic distress in the market, you can bet that cirrus will be tightening staff. After about 8 months of being at cirrus, they merged with zynbit. What we were told in an all hands is that we were the '800 pound gorilla' and that zynbit would in no way be taking over our platform. Long behold the opposite happened. Cirrus's platform was dubbed the '2019' version to eventually be sunset while zynbit's was rebranded to match the cirrus feel. At this time I've seen most of the original product and development staff leave or be layed off. In cirrus's defense, the platform needed to be changed. In my "pros" I made clear the complexity of the last system and I don't think they're at fault for wanting to adopt a newer system. They are at fault for guiding the original cirrus staff into thinking they were taking on Zynbit when they were really being dissolved by them. I think there is a lack of responsibility at the company for it to go through as many layoffs as they have. As a dev, you either have all the responsibility or none: There were a select few who held all the responsibilit. One guy (now layed off) who managed all the design work, one frontend architect (now layed off) who it seemed handled building out entire features himself. I analyzed the abundance of code that was racked up over a decade and tried to make sense of it. As stated in my pros, it was a more relaxing role to just try to make sense of things in order to patch bugs but it was oexrutiatingly boring. The only growth I found was in my patience and analytical abilities. After a year of patching endless abstractions within a dated framework, I found that I still did not understand anything about the underlying framework. This was because every ounce of effort went into understanding the business logic and the endless abstractions. It was around then I understood that I had to move on. Sense becoming zynbit, It felt like more of a startup again. Decisions were talked about that I was actually a part of, help was actually needed on important matters again. I tried a good deal to break out of my repetitive role and find purpose but never achieved anything more then a small internal feature (a form) on an internal companies setting page. Im pretty confident from my time at cirrus that if your objective is to find growth, this is not the company for you unless you are being brought on in an architect role. I had 7 years of experience at the time and found it insulting that I could not be given any real work despite my endless asking. The pay (at least at the time): I was payed 80k. Most of the other devs from what I gathered were in the 100-120 range. These are senior developer salaries in the bay area. I was discouraged from asking for a raise but I did anyways before seeking other work. I was quickly told no with little to no explanation. Snail pace: Decisions at the time I was there moved incredibly slowly. The amount of precaution taken made any initiative impossible to even discuss. The original platform inevitably fell victim to that slow pace. It took a year to onboard one of the largest clients.