Pros
- My peers were great to work with - Lots of autonomy on the day-to-day stuff (however this is becoming less and less the case over time) - The company does support working remotely, as long as you're comfortable with the caveats listed below
Cons
- If you're not one of the employees that came over from GE, you have a lot of extra work to do to prove yourself. There are a handful of people who Shall Not Be Disagreed With. - While the company does support working remotely for a large number of employees, if you are not in Denver, CO you are just a code monkey. I was frequently left out of meetings, even after being promised to be in them, apparently because it is just more convenient not to have to set up a conference call (admittedly the software they use to do this is terrible). This is especially frustrating since I am a domain expert in something that no one in Denver is. - After bringing up the above two issues separately with three different managers, I was met with indifference once, and twice told that that was just the way it is. - Did I mention that I reported to 7 managers in 4 years? Constant re-orgs are not the solution to any of their problems, but it does make it look like they're doing something. - The company has no interest in or process for learning from its mistakes. This is left entirely up to the individual, resulting in a very mixed bag of people who are working to improve, and people who are not. - This company used to be a very engineer-driven, bottom-up sort of place to work. Management is trying to change this into more top-down, marketing driven place. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with either strategy, but management has done such a poor job helping their employees with the transition that the company is in a state where the engineers still behave as if they run the place, while management behaves as if they run the place, and no one actually does. Management, apparently thinking they have succeeded in this transition, occasionally make Dilbert-esque decrees about new company strategies, but give no one any incentives to follow through (so no one does). Meanwhile, engineers continue doing their own thing, but without any incentives to make good decisions as a whole they are much more likely to do whatever gets them home to dinner on time without thinking about the long-term. - Communication to employees about the company is terrible. There were layoffs last year, and I never got any kind of official notice that several of my close coworkers were let go, everything was communicated through the grapevine. This results in constant rumors that the company is being sold, the company is being broken up and sold, the company is on the verge of this problem or that problem, etc. - Morale is extremely low and management doesn't seem to care. It took an extraordinarily long time for them to even acknowledge it. - The company is constantly cutting expenses, which recently has started to result in some serious corner-cutting, especially in IT. When replacing one thing with something cheaper, and they new thing doesn't meet someones needs they are told to just deal with it. The low quality of IM/VOIP/conferencing software is embarrassing in front of customers.
