Pros
* Allowed a reasonable level of independence in the role * Beautiful office at the time * Some really nice employees passed through in rapid order * The cookies we got as a christmas bonus were good.
Cons
* Caustic, malicious middle management. Arbitrary and falsified attacks were taken at face value, and Senior management refused to look at documented evidence of the falsifications. * PTO was not tracked, so unable to use. HR was uninterested in correcting. * Development side drove the Systems Infrastructure, ignoring the Systems Engineers. As a result, Industry Best Practices were not followed in several critical areas for both company and product architecture. * Cliques. Dear god the cliques. Figure out what it takes to get into a social group if you work here - or you ARE getting axed eventually. * Development team had no interest in bugs that clients reported or that Systems Engineers discovered. A bug I reported spent 6 months in the tracker without ever being touched, leaving me to deal with the angry customer. * Hiring seemed to focus on personality, not capability. I saw numerous fantastic employees flee or get fired from the company, and countless incapable or dangerous employees achieve success based on their social maneuvers within the company. This created an overbearingly depressive atmosphere. * No real one-on-one reviews. System Architecture was largely an afterthought, and no manager existed that could effectively review us. The partner who is a developer performed my review, but was clearly unaware of my productivity or metrics within the company. The meeting was more about checking a box than it was developing me as an employee. That meeting went satisfactorily enough, but I had a clear impression that they had no interest in me or my role.