Pros
This is one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had. I've gotten to work with some very high-quality people, both in their technical skills and in their approach to teamwork and collaboration. The work has been interesting and varied, with plenty of stimulating challenges. Management has been great, with wise leadership, clear vision and a very supportive attitude. The company is 100% remote, and has been that way since the beginning. As a result, it has a culture that knows how to make distributed teams work well, and new hires quickly pick up on the way it works. As well as making extensive use of text-based messaging systems like Teams and Slack, we're also encouraged to hop onto impromptu 1:1 video calls, often with screen sharing, whenever text-based communication is too slow or isn't clear enough. There's also a culture of learning from each other, and appreciating the unique skills that each team member has. I particularly enjoy the scheduled meetings where we take it in turns to present a technical topic to the group, from inside or outside the work context.
Cons
As a consulting company, we get a variety of types of work coming in, but it can be a bit of a hand-to-mouth existence. The company is working to increase the length of the pipeline of new clients so that the workflow is more predictable. Companies usually don't seek help from consultants until they've run out of other options, so by the time they come to us things have often gotten into a poor state and we're called upon to fight fires before we can get onto the real work of implementing a long-term strategy. However, if you like stepping into a crisis and making a difference, this can be quite rewarding. For some people, it's hard never seeing any of your colleagues in person. One solution is to plan to go to some of the same conferences, but this can be expensive without company help and you don't always end up seeing the people you most want to.
