Pros
The vast majority of your colleagues at the individual contributor level (and even a few at the middle manager level) are some of the most lovely and competent people with whom you will ever have the pleasure of working. Helping libraries give their patrons the best experience possible is and always will be incredibly rewarding work and you will love doing it.
Cons
ByWater is a family like any other—there are golden children that can do no wrong and scapegoats that will be blamed for the entire family’s problems even after they gather the courage to run away. May god have mercy should you (or your wider team) have the misfortune of ending up in the latter category. Be warned that it will be an uphill battle to avoid being scapegoated if you don’t work with the Koha product 99% of the time, although I should mention that I lucked out majorly on that front compared to some of my teammates. Don’t just take my word for it on being “family” either! When my competent manager and lead dev left the company this summer, higher ups wasted no time comparing us to their children by telling our colleagues that we were “pouting” and “yelled” at them when raising basic concerns about next steps in a normal tone of voice; I wonder if the same diction would have been used if the remaining team members weren’t all women. Before I left, things deteriorated to the degree that myself and a few others actively discussed two-party state recording laws because we were desperate to share what we thought were totally normal conversations with others for feedback (recording is a no-go, by the way). Here’s an amuse-bouche of some of the other things that I experienced at ByWater: • Getting in trouble for taking a team photo at staff retreat • COO that gaslights people about what he said to the point everyone has to keep receipts that he ignores if brought up • No shared financial numbers (even if you’re a c-suite member!) • Company-level goals all about NOT doing stuff and nothing else…??????? • Employing friends with no formal hiring process • General misogyny — they’ll use the fact that women make up the majority of library workers against you if you try to complain about it, too, all without any self-awareness that library leadership (like company leadership) is still predominantly men! • Previously absent coworkers showing up to open-source community meetings and embarrassing you by acting without regard to the needs, desires, or basic social comfort of the people that have been participating for years TL;DR: I knew what she was dealing with behind the scenes wasn’t pretty, but I did not realize just how much my manager/mentor was shielding me from the drama, chaos, confusion, and madness for the past two years. Before all this went down, I used to think that even winning the lottery couldn’t get me to part with my job at ByWater. Look at me now.