Pros
I got to work on a lot of cool projects and gained significant experience that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. I also genuinely liked my coworkers. The people around me and commiserating were a big part of what made the job bearable. There's also unlimited paid time off - it's the only offered benefit. The great PTO kept me there for longer than I should have stayed.
Cons
I was the longest-standing employee. Everyone before me was either fired or quit rapidly once other options surfaced. I gave it a genuine hard try, I cared, and I'm proud of how much I helped move the company forward while I was there. It was also the most dysfunctional organization I've worked for in my professional career.
The core issue is leadership, specifically the owner. Decisions were driven by emotion and ego. The pattern was reactive: respond to a symptom, declare it solved, watch the same problem resurface deeper. Repeat. There was no real plan, only survival mode and a reflex toward whatever quick opportunity appeared next. That dysfunction filtered down through the whole company.
The distance between the values marketed externally and the day-to-day reality inside was wide. The culture was improving by the time I left, but its history was toxic and informed my entire experience there.
Turnover ran through every layer: clients, contractors, employees. People left within months or were let go, the company steadied for a month or two, and the cycle restarted. Client retention was poor. Internal communication was poor. The expectation was "execute no matter what," without the clarity, structure, or resources that make execution possible. Leadership disparaged former employees in front of current ones and located nearly every systemic failure in a single person, almost never in the system itself.
That disparaging instinct is the one worth flagging for anyone considering this place. When something breaks here, the question is rarely what in the structure allowed it. It's who to point at. I watched that happen to people ahead of me, and I have no illusions about how my own exit read from the inside.
The job carried most of the downsides of a corporate role and none of the upsides. Pay sat below the scope of the work. The workload was heavy enough to bury people. Financial pressure came from the top often enough that instability became the baseline mood. Employees were expected to operate at a leadership level without the respect, trust, or resources to do it. It wore people down.
After five years, the company remains deeply dysfunctional, with leadership citing recent revenue growth as proof of success. Revenue isn't success. They haven't figured that out, and from where I sat, they don't seem capable of an honest read on what the company is actually worth or accomplishing.