Pros
There's a lot of interesting work. (keyword, a LOT) Lots of autonomy and ownership over the work. Smart and willing to help co-workers. Managers who care and want to help you succeed.
Cons
In the pros I mentioned there is a lot of interesting work. The reason for this is because it seems that the business model is to acquire as much work and as many contracts as possible, then dump slightly more work onto the full-time employees than they can handle. Additionally, co-ops are over-utilized and given too much responsibility. Some may thrive in these situations, but I have overseen and discussed this closely with several co-ops, and most of them felt overburdened with work and level of responsibility required of them. It's not uncommon for new employees to take charge of 3-4 projects within the first few months of their tenure, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often they are not given enough resources, time, or help, because everyone else at the company is just as, if not more, busy than they are. The biggest issue at RKF is the leadership. Beyond their business plan of acquiring as much work as possible and figuring out who will do it later (which causes huge headaches for the engineers and middle managers), there are other pitfalls. 1. I often felt like a number to them, and not a valued employee or human being. I've been told that I'm doing a good job purely because I've made them a profit. 2. Some of them will call you out of the blue, and expect you to drop everything and listen to them drone on for 30+ minutes about something that is irrelevant to you or the work you are currently doing. 9/10 times an email would have sufficed. 3. They believe that experience is the most important thing, and value experience way more highly than actual contributions. 4. They are also out of touch with modern technology, but are in charge of contracts and projects that require modern technology. This leads to the second biggest issue at RKF, which is the lack of people, especially at the managerial and C-level, with modern software development knowledge and what is required for modern software development (both in terms of resources/time as well as actual technologies). As far as I know, no middle manager or higher has a background in software or software development which causes issues in communicating requirements or needs. If you want a place to learn modern software development, this is not the place to be. Most software is literal scripts, excel spreadsheets, or internal-only, which means there is usually a lack of polish that modern software requires. While there are pros like a good amount of autonomy and trust right off the bat, the costs of that are little to no mentorship, requirement to learn knowledge that is not relevant to software to perform non-software tasks and often a plate full of work that is difficult to complete and achieve in a normal work week. That being said, in general people were not asked to work more than 40 hours a week, but I find it hard to believe that for quite a few individuals how that was remotely possible. Pay is also below industry standard for software engineers, and unlikely to change for the better. This is coming purely from a software perspective, and I don't speak for others in the company who are more focused on the regulatory side.
