Pros
- Relaxed and friendly working environment. - 95% you do 9 to 18 job hours, although not flexible. - CEO is apparently a very good salesman. He has fun with what he does.
Cons
- The ones above are the only pro. - Zero growth opportunity. Work ethic is a joke. - Low wage offered without shame or market consciousness. - Information barriers. You will barely know what you need to get the job done. - Dark financial and contractual decisions - Company does not like challenge. Your fresh ideas are trashed in favour of easier-to-implement ugly surely-working solutions. - Quality is a luxury also when it does not need to be. Best way to lose faith in made-in-italy. - The legacy nature of the product and development workflow will kill your motivation. - Zero task management. No standard way of keeping track of duties and workflow. You will regret (and be blamed) for not taking a picture of the whiteboard that day. - CTO does not listen, but he is also convinced to be a team player. If somehow you audaciously convince him to implement your proposal, you will be blamed for it and asked to do extra hours to fix it (leadership, yay!). - CEO and CTO often unsay things they said. - Mobbing reported on some occasions. - Codebase is a complete mess: { ... Six people working on one SVN branch. ... Code documentation is a dream. You squeeze CTO for drops of knowledge. ... Bad design is the preferred solution to quick-fix problems. ... Copy-paste is the preferred solution to reproduce functionalities. ... What works, stays. High technical debt. ... You can fix bugs.. but not the design. The bugs you will fix are the effort of previous employees to solve this dilemma. And future employees will fix yours. } - Overall turnover is high (employees leave after ~1y on avg). Well this is not a cons, it’s a consequence. - "STAGE" (you will just love it).