Stable job, but behind the times.
Pros
Staff are generally friendly, smart, and good to work with. Company is established in the market - it is well known within its industry, and certain parts of the business have been consistently profitable for years. JBA also generally has a good understanding of the market it works in, and the ways in which its products are used.
Cons
Pay is generally low, and the company struggles to attract and retain experienced talent. Lack of improvement on pay, benefits, and working conditions is often attributed by senior management to the controlling influence of the parent company, JBA Consulting. The company has not embraced many industry standard practices in software. Virtualisation and cloud computing are not widely adopted; instead, a single sysadmin struggles to maintain a large fleet of in-house servers. A devops culture does not really exist as a result - software teams do not have the ability to easily provision compute resources, to automatically deploy software, or to ensure that the environment their software is deployed to is what they expect. The internally managed systems are often unreliable. There was a strong preference for hiring in junior staff for many roles, including software. This has led to the software teams fairly isolated from the current state of the art. A lot of effort is spent reinventing the wheel because there is simply no awareness of what solutions exist in the wider world. This can damage the career prospects of junior staff - there are several skills and technologies that many software companies expect, but which JBA will not give you experience in. Progression within the company beyond a moderate level is strongly tied to moving into full-time managerial or customer-facing positions. As staff move up into such roles in order to secure promotions, and lose most of their working day to bureaucracy, skills and experience are lost. As a consequence of the fairly low level of experience in the company, there is a heavy emphasis on manual testing and quality control of software and data products. This acts as a bottleneck to almost all work in the company. The lack of responsibility placed on non-QC staff to test their own work means much of it is of low quality, and the QC team rely almost entirely on manual testing, with no automated, reproducible methods of testing software. A significant portion of the company's work is consultancy work. This is often very high pressure, with numerous staff noting that stress and bullying from project managers has brought them to tears. Such work is often poorly scoped and unprofitable, with the company often having several projects it simply can't stop burning money on. Around this, there is a strong culture of working overtime, with company directors having openly stated that they do not expect to promote staff who don't work overtime. Teams have little autonomy to improve or change their ways of working, and are not trusted to work autonomously. There is a strongly ingrained culture of top-down control - managers who have not been involved in the daily work for years become upset if not consulted on exactly how the work should be done. The company struggles to prioritise work, meaning it often has too much on its plate. Certain parts of the company work on products that certain managers want to create, not what the customers are asking for.
