Forced Smiles, Fun Work, Fairly Middling
Pros
I really enjoyed my time at Phase2. I felt like I was able to do my best work, be myself, and was often rewarded for doing exactly what was asked for. My various teams often felt like small families, and I made some seriously good connections with other developers and project managers. I learned how a good PM can be exactly what you need in order to do your greatest, and was encourage to grow in ways that I found interesting. As a company with a very long history of remote work, Phase2 is absolutely wonderful at supporting remote workers, which made COVID a lot easier to handle than it could have been. I imagine this will not change at all in the future. The transparency about financials, often mentioned in the reviews here, was one of my first big loves about how P2 does things. I loved seeing how the company was doing and getting warnings of if the company was going through a hard time. I did not see any distinct misogyny in my time at the company, at least for developers, which is also very pleasant to point out.
Cons
I learned a phrase at Phase2 that has stuck with me for years: "toxic positivity". There is a very cult-like atmosphere where you are heavily discouraged from saying things that may be negative. CEO worship is heavy, as is any other executive. Some of the people in charge do deserve respect, and they were my favorite people at the company. Others do not understand the power balance at play inherent in being an executive, and use that power, knowingly or unknowingly, to suppress any dissonance. This came up in the DEI meetings, in planning company events, and in any sort of questioning of how things were done at a company level. If you think there is a problem with the company, but can't offer a 100% viable solution immediately, your problem is swept away. On that note, the transparency only goes so far. If you work at Phase2, don't expect to ever be notified that someone is leaving the company, whether by choice or not. Employees only join the company (because it's so great to work there), they never leave (because why would you?). Similarly, that honestly doesn't apply when discussing employee mental health. "Don't be a hero. Don't work over 40 hours. ...unless your project really really really needs it [and they always do]." It took a very firm stance to maintain my work-life balance, one that others (some I managed) were incapable or unwilling to be as firm on, and their mental fitness struggled as a result. Everything is marketing. As a person who loves development and loves my projects, I always felt like I gave 100% at the job--but that wasn't enough for the company. I also needed to be doing extra things, like writing up blog posts about nothing interesting at all, or speaking at Drupalcon, or running an ERG (what Phase2 calls Guilds). And if what you're doing can't be marketed, it won't be seen as important. When I left, even company retreats were being turned into a marketing opportunity, somehow. I don't imagine it has gotten better. There's a lot more: the difficulty in getting any sort of title change; the inability to get a raise without a title change; the devaluing of non-developers; the tokenization of non-cis, non-white, and non-males.
