Pros
- Decent company to launch software career (eg. decent starting pay, low expectation of contribution starting out, drawn out on-boarding process of ~6 weeks); comfortable company to retire at - Small company with some great manager(s); can get more resposibilities if you want them - Flexible once you demonstrate competence and value - Good attempts to try to build a company culture with annual events - There are a handful of respectable senior employees with good morals and technical knowledge that make the day-to-day more tolerable - You can get higher compensation if you put in the time (eg. a decade or more) with diminishing returns
Cons
- Conservative, seniority-oriented mindset; stack company rating which favors more senior employees; performance deficits are not penalized; inconsistency with how different managers manage teams - Core software package is written in Databus in C, which is a business-oriented language that writes like assembly but lacks all of the benefits of C (eg. data structures, pointers, multi-threading, etc) - Flexibility can be nauseating - Toxic work environment without the execution that justifies it; one has to ask for perks and raises as annual raises are consistently low-balled - Too much unwarranted back-patting during quarterly/annual meetings; overhead requires certain departments to pull more than their own weight; certain departments/employees garner more attention and praise than deserved - Fairly horizontal hierarchy; senior developer is a title that doesn't correspond with an actual value in merit - Business model thrives off of continually on-boarding clients to cover the bottom line - No real room for good computer science/engineering; QA team is not really a QA team; waterfall development process, which results in overhead for software devs
