Pros
Hands down, the best aspect of working at ShipCompliant is the people. While there are certainly a few exceptions, the people are some of the best I've ever worked with. I can honestly say I have close friends as colleagues here. The people at ShipCompliant are hardworking, driven, and incredibly bright. That said, the title of the review is "Fading Potential" for a reason. The culture in ShipCompliant has changed significantly over the past year after the acquisition; as a result, there has been some significant turnover and good people are starting to leave. It's been sad to see, but the ShipCompliant I first joined is fading more and more quickly.
Cons
There are two main categories to touch on here. The first is job-focused, the second will be company focused. For the job-focused cons, it's especially compensation, work/life balance, and career opportunities. 1. Compensation- you wouldn't think you work for a highly successful tech company in Boulder based on the salaries at ShipCompliant. While the company says it seeks top talent (what company wouldn't), actions speak louder than words and the action just isn't there. You might take on a tremendous amount of additional responsibility, but only see your pay increase marginally at best, and even then it will only happen during the annual review process. Pay is extraordinarily low based on what is expected of employees, which brings me to... 2. Work/Life Balance- Outwardly, the company seems like it should do a great job of this, winning one of Outside Magazine's coveted "Best Places To Work" in 2014. The culture itself doesn't always lend itself to a healthy balance. While it may be technically be the case that employees are encouraged to maintain balance between work and life, that's really only the case when all work has been finished. That sounds great, but there's always more work to do. Expect to stay late, come in early, or be looked at as an under-performing employee. There is a growing, single-minded focus on metrics and numbers- understandable to some extent, but quickly becoming the only important measure of the business- that contributes to an almost inexorable feeling of a necessity to sacrifice personal time in favor of work. 3. Career opportunities- While management continues to try and emphasize the avenues for career growth, there is still a lack of concrete action to back it up. For the company-focused cons, it's largely the gradual disappearance of the culture and diminishing quality of the product. 1. Company culture- After the acquisition in 2015, the unique and wonderful culture of ShipCompliant has been slowly replaced with a more corporate culture (along with the bureaucracy that comes along with that). As an example, every Friday we have wine hour, essentially a company happy hour where we're able to be social and relax at the end of the week. Historically, people would stay at the office until late evening to spend time with their friends at work. Now, people either go back to work or they leave the office. 2. Quality of the product- ShipCompliant used to have, hands down, the single best product in the (albeit somewhat niche) market. While that may still technically be true, it's now because of a lack of other options in the market as opposed to a continuing quality of the ShipCompliant software. The priorities from management seem to convey that the goal is "good enough" as opposed to being the best. There have been decisions that suggest a disregard for current clients, many of whom have begun to notice. This isn't isolated to a handful of decisions either; rather, it's symptomatic of much greater declines in the business generally. Also, the CEO is no longer Jason Eckenroth, who was fantastic. The disapproval is for Andy, the CEO at Sovos (the parent company).