Pros
In spite of all of the bad things about this company, there are / were some great people that wound up working here.
Cons
If I could provide an overall ranking of 0 stars, I would. Nothing...literally nothing was good about working here. The last two years have been some of the worst working experience I have ever encountered. The managers are manipulative, and constantly micromanage their employees and often times find ways to sabotage employees to get them fired if the manager doesn't like them. During my 2+ years at this company, I had to point out to them on several occasions that several things they were doing in regards to vacation / holiday pay / company policies were not legal. It took them more than a year to correct one of those issues after I repeatedly pointed it out to them. I had to watch my vacation balance like a hawk. I had to leave early from work one day, and worked from home for the rest of the day, but they still deducted time from my PTO balance for it. After pointing out that discrepancy to them, it took several months to get that corrected. When I was leaving the company I had to inform them that their policy on vacation payout was illegal. No room for promotion unless you are a backstabbing individual with a penchant for playing political games and screwing people over. Zero morale in the software group. No pride in the products and no plan to make things better; just keep pumping out new features with little to no testing. Often times, features are presented, and argued about for reasons as to why they shouldn't be done, and the software engineers are overruled resulting in terrible designs that can't be maintained or even tested. Salaried employee? NOPE, you will be treated like an hourly employee. Company policy mandates that salaried employees average 44 hours per week, with two unpaid 15 minute breaks and a minimum of a 30 minute unpaid lunch. Everyone ignores it, but that's the policy. If you work more than 40 hours per week, but want to take off early on Friday? NOPE - they'll steal PTO from you for doing that, or fire you for it (yes, this actually happened). The software group is the whipping boy of the company. You are not allowed to have anything above and beyond what the entry-level, sales or tech support employees have. Offsite lunches?? NOPE - that will create a perception problem and is unfair to those HOURLY employees that have a different job. Work from home? NOPE - that's not fair to those HOURLY employees that have to come into the office to be on the phone. The only news that the software group gets is bad news. But if members from other groups just DO THEIR JOB, all kinds of accolades and commendations are thrown their way because they ANSWERED THE PHONE. They don't want remote workers, but they employ several full-time remote employees in different departments, including the development group. However, if one of the local software developers needs to work from home for more than a few hours, that's not allowed. Even getting a few hours to work from home generally has to be pre-approved by management and is often times flat out denied. They don't trust their employees and treat everyone like children. Unless you are under their watchful eye every single day, they can't believe that you will do your job to the best of your abilities. If you argue about why something shouldn't be done and hold your ground, they'll ignore that you are actually trying to protect the product and ensure good results and accuse you of being an obstructionist and threaten to fire you. The core software is impossible to maintain and have any reasonable guarantee that said maintenance won't break some other very important feature. The original design was complete spaghetti code and we were never allowed to rewrite it. Pieces of the code have been re-engineered to be more stable and actually implement some patterns, but the absolute core of it is a complete wasteland. Add to all of that the mandate of "100% backwards compatibility", and you have a train-wreck of a software product that can never be changed in any way.
