Pros
- Very young colleagues (high proportion of young graduates): friendly atmosphere and great energy. - Human-sized. Everyone is easily reachable. The CEO's office could be just next to yours - Critical projects: provides a good opportunity to learn many stuff, very fast, and to rapidly get a hand on all the technical aspects of your application. During a typical week, you can do back-end dev on day 1, front-end dev on day 2, playing with a database (dev or production !) on day 3, doing some DevOps on day 4, and debugging (or even setting up) production VMs on day 5 ! No one will be afraid to give you admin rights to the CI server or root access to a production VM, even if you are a junior ! - (Depends on your project/client) Time is allowed to add new technos/improve the infrastructure of your application - This is an IT services company (SS2I/ESN according to the French nomination). They are dozens of them in the Sophia-Antipolis technopark, which all have more-or-less the same clients portfolio (big IT companies, mostly in Sophia). Here, this is not the case, you will work mostly non-IT companies (which I did), and also start-ups located in Sophia (which is a good opportunity to discover the start-up world, while having a safe back-up) - Good salary (compared to many other companies in Sophia-Antipolis), and good yearly salary raises, if work is done. - Standard perks (net allowance for transportation, french "tickets restaurants" 20x9€ per month), most of which are not taxed. - Extra perks: french "Prime d'intéressement" is higher than in bigger companies. French "Plan d'Epargne Entreprise". Cinema reductions: you can benefit from 4 cinema tickets at half the price, per month - Ideal location: French Riviera, 5mins from the sea, 1h from the mountains, Monaco and the Italian border - As the headquarters are located in Antibes and not inside the Sophia-Antipolis park, if you work there, you will be less affected by the traffic jam and the disrespectful drivers (which are the great plague of the French Riviera) - (Personal) I had a very good team, an open-minded client (which is rare in that kind of environment) and very good managers
Cons
The main one is the lack of transparency during the recruitment process: - I was not told that I wouldn't benefit from the french "RTTs" during my first year, or that the mandatory "Prime vacances" was pro-rata given during the first year. - Then, there is the ambiguity about the company's status: during the process, and in every brochure, it is told that it's a "software editor", whereas it is an IT services company (SS2I/ESN). - Some projects are decades old. You will have to deal with spaghetti/legacy code, and spend a lot of time refactoring what needs to be refactored. - Lack of internationality: the majority of the clients are French-speaking, and the oral/written communication is in French.