Pros
My coworkers were great to work with. I was always able to use the latest software and got to work on interesting projects. There are free snacks. I never really had to stay late or work on the weekends.
Cons
The owners have never worked anywhere else, so they lack perspective on how things are at any other business but here. The only people that have a chance to be an owner are people who start their career at CEC and never leave. There are basically three groups of people: the owners, the rest of the managers and everyone else. They take care of the owners and managers pretty well, but there is very little room for advancement outside of those two groups of people. There is just no where to go inside the company. This has caused quite a few experienced people to leave, which they replaced with younger more inexperienced employees. The odd thing is a company wide survey a few years ago revealed that the people with 5-10 years of experience were the most dissatisfied in the company. They are also very cheap in some ways when it comes to spending money. They decided not to replace the Outlook email server and instead moved the whole company to Gmail which is web based and a mess. They also needed to replace a server and upgrade their backup system. Instead of spending the money to fix it they lost some data from a server because they weren't backing it up properly. They don't really pay that well, I found out later that I was underpaid the whole time I worked there. When I did get a decent raise at one annual review they had the audacity to tell me I should consider myself lucky to get that big of a raise at that point in my career! Then to top it off in the same annual review I was told my projects were making too much money. The company really started to go downhill when the majority owner decided to sell out and the end of 2012 and they were also building their new corporate headquarters/palace in the Galardia Office Park. This put a strain on the company that caused almost 20% of their staff to quit or be laid off in 2014 and 2015. The company had simply changed from what it had been. The financial strain was evident, but it seemed to me that they had bought into the whole idea that they needed to cater to the Millennial generation. Any substantial bonus or financial compensation was replaced with bowling outings, food trucks, catchy slogans and mission statements that changed every year at the annual company meeting/pep rally. The place is now just one big Kool-Aid party. If you drink it you're in, if you don't just get out.
