Pros
Hart goes over the top to provide some of the best available benefits in the software industry. They provide free catered lunch everyday, any healthy snack you can think of, free drinks, top of the line hardware, unlimited PTO, competitive salaries, and much more. They truly attempt to put their employees at the top of their priority list. To add to all this, they have a cool product with a lot of potential.
Cons
Despite the luxuries they heap upon their employees, Hart does a poor job at executing on their vision. Hart bills itself as a company that cares about quality, but does little to encourage or prioritize quality at a company level. Continuous integration solutions are not an important part of the development process, company leadership refuses to make unit testing an important component of the development process, and failing tests are not prioritized or fixed quickly. As a result of this, deadlines are frequently missed, deployments that should take hours end up taking weeks, and finger-pointing is prevalent as employees seek to protect their own interests over those of the company. Hart leadership encourages its employees to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, and favors internal promotions over external hires. Although this is a great idea in theory, it means that most of the company's leadership came from the company's early hires and have little to no experience in leadership roles prior to their promotion to VP at Hart. The leadership team is left to its own devices, and allowed to make its own mistakes, sometimes to the detriment of the entire company. The company values culture over qualifications to the degree that a candidate who does not fit the "company culture" can be denied employment. Not only has this created difficulties for team leaders in hiring the engineers they need for their teams, but it also magnifies the best and worst aspects of the company culture, as only employees who fit that mold are hired or progress within the company. This can be problematic in a culture that encourages drinking, when important company business is sometimes performed at bars or lounges. Hart also has an accountability problem. The leadership team does not seem to want to accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong, but seems to have the expectation that everyone else in the company will step up and accept the blame for their own failures. In the absence of clear leaders over various teams in the company, this leaves an accountability vacuum, where nobody is clearly at fault, despite the fact that nothing works the way it is supposed to.
