Pros
• They value craftsmanship, a lot. They are serious about code review. • Smart, humble folks. • Use modern tools - always looking for the best tool for the job, and constantly experimenting. • They get sustainable pace - they let me choose how many hours a week I wanted to work, and only once (when a customer had a crisis) did they ask me to work more than that. • They pay fairly - Role Model pays contractors hourly, and they pay employees a salary. They have some pretty sweet cash bonuses that they offer to employees to incentivize folks becoming employees rather than contractors. In both the hourly and salary offers that Role Model made me, they surprised me with their generosity, and I have never felt like I needed to push them so that I could get a fair rate. • They value families. My wife and I have been very blessed through my working with them. They have been honorable in all their dealings with me. • I worked as a remote contractor with Role Model, and enjoyed it. We used Screenhero for pairing and Slack for group IM.
Cons
• They value craftsmanship, a lot. Sometimes this means back and forth, back and forth code reviews, and getting code shipped can sometimes take a while. I came from an environment with tons of technical debt and business management who didn't value the craftsmanship desires of the technical guys, so I would rather be part of a team on the craftsmanship extreme than scurrying about frantically slinging code and never taking time to get your house off the sand and onto the rock. But if you don't like collaboration, people constantly giving you feedback on how you could code better, and polishing your code regularly, you are not going to enjoy working here. • If you're going the contractor route, and you've never done contracting before, you should know that you'll need some cash cushion, because Role Model pays contractors by check. If you have an LLC or similar business structure, that also means it takes longer to get paid. Let's say that you work the month of January, and then send them an invoice on February 2nd. The check usually arrives around February 10th, then you deposit it into your business bank account, which can take 1-5 days. Then you pay yourself and deposit it into your personal bank account, which can take another 1-5 days. So its not unusual for it to take until February 20th for you to actually have your money for the work you did January 1-30th. You'll want to have enough of a cash cushion to handle that.