Pros
Shawshank Redemption. That is what comes to mind when I think of my last day with Lanyon. I was Andy Dufresne crawling out of the sewer to freedom. I left Lanyon over the summer and wanted to give it some time, to let the dust settle, so I wouldn't post a reactionary review here. It turns out time doesn't matter, my thoughts are the same. I only hope what I post here will help someone in their decision to NOT take a job with Lanyon. For pros, it really is the people. Lanyon united their employees together the same way Herb Brooks united the 1980 USA hockey team, but unintentionally. Most of my team had such a negative view of Lanyon that we bonded over discussing what didn't work, why, and what management should do about it. I became close with so many cross department personnel that I would work with again in a heartbeat. Oh and the conference rooms had nice chairs. That's seriously all that was good about Lanyon.
Cons
We're gonna need a bigger box. To me, Lanyon is a fixer upper house and Vista (their private equity holder) is a flipper. They were simply packaging it nicely for a sale to some larger entity. They weren't putting in Viking appliances or a deck made with Trex. They were putting in scratch and dent appliances and untreated wood. All functional and they do the job, but are not the best materials for the job. They are able to fool some customers with this approach, but when decades of experience gives their two weeks notice because they catch on, your products and services suffer. Hiring 20 year olds and giving them poor benefits is a great cost cutting measure, but how great will your company be when your best employees are just kids? Perhaps management should have spent less time in an airplane and having steak dinners on the company dime. Perhaps management should have forgone the Oz Principle for cultural change and instead promoted a culture of listening and transparency. Perhaps they shouldn't tout software that doesn't exist or won't exist for another year. There was more spin in company meetings than a White House press briefing. The inflated egos floating around HQ were quite apparent. If you worked for Big Machines you had a great chance of being a leader of the company; despite not knowing anything about the industry. On a more personal level, the implementation of stack ranking is a morale killer. Pay is below market and they admit it. If you have a family, insurance is incredibly expensive. It is a CDHP with an HSA. I paid thousands more out of pocket when it was implemented. Career advancement is non existent. They invent titles such as 'associate' ' senior' and 'team lead', or 'I,II,III' to designate a role change, but all the person gets is more work. Training? You are better off with Youtube and an Amazon gift card. For established employees, training consisted of such whiz bangers as 'Excel tips and tricks'. Great. My path to enterprise software greatness was germinated with my new knowledge of autosum and inserting a row. Millennials are attracted to a company by their 'why'. Why am I going to work everyday and what will I achieve that is greater than myself? The answer for me was nothing. Lanyon is simply led by private equity in order to make a quick buck without investing in the future of their employees. Once I understood that, I left. Let me save you the trouble of having to leave by never accepting an offer in the first place.