Never stop asking questions - Anonymous employee UrbanCode Employee Review

3.0
Jul 30, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

On a whole there a ton of smart people at UrbanCode. You will learn a lot if you apply what you know, and ask about the things you don't know. There is huge opportunity for growth since the span of technologies they use is vast. The only thing preventing you from learning what you want to know is not asking and trying new things. I learned more about linting code, writing legible code, and testing then I got in any course in college up till this job.

Cons

Since the company was acquired by IBM, there has been humongous growth in the span of a short period of time. This has caused them to have a lack of developers, which has hindered the speed at which they can fix the bugs arising (as well as bugs that had existed prior to acquisition). However, they are currently hiring, so this issue will resolve itself as time moves on. The fact that many things "have always worked like that" can lead people to not want to change things when they need changing. I found this created unnecessary friction in the office space that otherwise would have been really easy to resolve. At times, it could feel like whoever was most revered / talked the loudest got what they wanted in the product feature as oppose to what should have been done (e.g. the logical decision) IBM processes get in the way of actual feature productions because of how terrible their SSO system is. I have upwards of 13 passwords at least, and resetting them happens every 3 months or so. Oh, and if forget that your programs are set to auto login, you can get locked out of your account for 24 hours without the ability to reset. If you aren't careful, you can get sucked in and loose your work life balance because there is always a deadline, and constant, what I would call, "fire drills". There is something always wrong that needs fixing or getting out. And while that is part of the software development cycle, the pace at which it happened while I was here grew tiresome and felt like things again could have been avoided if the team were focused on bringing down the technical debt instead of doing feature development. Some of this I would attribute to the relax take on Agile, and poor timelines around sprints.

Explore other reviews about UrbanCode

5.0
Jul 13, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Urbancode was a great company to work for with many great people and side benefits.

Cons

Development of new product was sometimes slow, but that is inherent in a development organizations.

5.0
Dec 7, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Being a software developer at a smaller software company puts you right in the action. This isn't a place for someone who wants to do 8 hours of adequate work on some internal application and then drop it all and go home, this is a place for people who want to get things done, and that's well-established in the company culture. The company is expanding rapidly, and there is a lot of room for growth for people who can run with new projects or show initiative. The core development team is very knowledgable, and provides a good foundation for new people. The kind of software being developed provides great experience and exposes developers to a large variety of relevant tools and technologies. The employees are a close-knit group, partly due to company events like weekly company lunches, company parties, and other social events. Benefits are good: solid insurance, free parking or public transit pass, your choice of computer provided by the company, reimbursement for $1000/year of recreational spending, bonuses, etc. Location is a plus as well - the office is in a nicer part of downtown Cleveland, and living expenses are still low here.

Cons

There is a lot of work relative to the number of people to do it. Work/life balance can suffer from time to time as a result, although this primarily affects more senior developers with greater exposure to customer issues. It can also be difficult to keep track of everything that is going on sometimes. Recent growth and the addition of new roles have brought on some new challenges which may take some time for the company to figure out, but that's not really a pro or a con, just a result of the stage the company is at.

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