Pros
-It's a job. It pays well for what it is. -I like my coworkers pretty okay. My manager is great. -I think a lot of the employees are great people who have good ideas and great work ethic.
Cons
-I have never once been excited to go to work. I've never even been happy to go to work. Work has never been fun. Work has never been something I looked forward to even in the slightest. If you're looking to have your soul completely crushed, well. Look no further. -If you're younger than 35, you might be the only person in your age group working in a group. I mean it. Some contractors are young, though. It doesn't seem like a bad thing, but being young and working here is... frustrating. You can't relate to a lot of the people around you... and that's the worst feeling, to be alone somewhere that you hate but you're forced to go there every day. -There is 0 work life balance. In fact, we used to be able to work from home in my department, but then they took that away. It's ridiculous. -Upper management makes really... non-informed decisions far too quickly and expects basically magic from its employees. -Also employees who are full-time don't get trained. Apparently they'll train contractors though. -The company is too fickle. You might write some code for a project, and the company will just drop the project. That's normal, you know, except that it happens more often than it doesn't. You barely get any critical information because everyone's changing too much at once, it's like no one has ever made goals before they came to this company. And finally, I know more about what's bad about the company from random people bad mouthing it from the outside than I do from what management tells us on the inside. -If you love writing code, then coming here will probably make you like it a lot less. -Contractors know more about the infrastructure than people who work at the company. So when they leave, you know, there goes all the stuff that works. -I don't know if the CEO is the problem, but the culture of this company is so backwards I could cry. The place is toxic. -We moved from a nice building with space to one where you can hear everyone's conversations around you and there are barely any conference rooms. The reasoning was because the company couldn't pay for the building or something, I'm not sure. Whatever it is, the moving choice does nothing for motivation. -There are great developers working for the company, which is great. But the company also fires a lot of great developers who do great work for them as contractors. And also, there are people who have been contractors forever who should be working full time. So what I'm saying is, don't expect your due diligence. -The architecture and systems are antiquated. And we could fix it if we weren't constantly bombarded with bad decisions on acquisitions and so forth from higher up, but that's impossible because everyone in upper management just wants to waste your time and their time. -When I applied, they told me I'd be challenged. The work isn't challenging. What's challenging is that you're writing for systems that are so old they don't get support from the companies that made them while simultaneously not communicating with teams within the company who all have their own problems. Also the stuff I mentioned about the company being fickle compounds the difficulty here. This kind of artificial difficulty is absolute garbage. -The company is dishonest. Extremely so. -You can get away with doing nothing, because the company either gives you over-complicated stuff to do that can't be finished OR they give you no work at all. It's been a roller coaster ride of expectations. Sometimes I would kill for work and other times I wonder why they can't give me something that's more at my level. -I work full-time and I don't have any vacation time. Just PTO. I probably should have vacation time, right? But I don't. and getting time off for PTO is like pulling teeth.
