Positive ethos and remote work, but stagnant advancement
Pros
Overall great company to work for. They have a positive ethos on how and why to do business. Company is privately-owned so less of the shareholder-type pressures. They're true believers in the remote work model, which is nice to see. The internal Wiki systems that Web teams use for knowledge management is extremely useful and impressive and makes the work much easier with a repository of documentation to help. Really good people all around, can't think of a single negative interaction I had with anyone. Culture is highly teamwork-focused and a lot of value is placed on constructive mentorship and intra-team camaraderie. Nobody ever got thrown under the bus or verbally castigated or publicly humiliated if and when mistakes were ever made, which is so much rarer than it should be in corporate America. The firm uses incidents to help everyone learn rather than try and scapegoat and ultimately pick off unfavored team members. Overall, this mostly benevolent people-culture was the primary reason that I really liked working here.
Cons
You will never get an Exceeds Expectations in any area of your performance review apparently. You can quantitatively, measurably exceed management's expectations and you will still never be given that rating. This contributes to the perception that opportunity for internal advancement is very stagnant, particularly when annual salary bumps do not meet cost of living increases. A lot of effort is spent managing incidents in waterfall fashion and project planning for larger efforts ends up never happening. Lots of "yes, it's done" but only occasionally does that mean "yes, it's also well-documented" (the firm's smart use of AI is well-suited to handle the missing parts there).
