Pros
- Convenient location, directly above the DuPont Circle Metro station. - Employees have the ability to make decisions concerning the physical layout of their workplace. - The company hopes to solve important, challenging problems in education. - Free refreshments, coffee, and snacks. Ping pong, foosball, and a vintage Dig Dug arcade machine, if you're into that sort of thing. - CTO is incredibly intelligent, and is experienced not only as a Scala developer, but has successfully implemented continuous delivery as an engineering process. - The staff has many talented engineers capable of understanding difficult and abstract topics in computer science, e.g. category theory and functional programming.
Cons
- Poor executive leadership, a management structure which does not position the company for success. - The company does not serve its customers well. There is no product road map, and the allocation of time spent engineering tech debt vs. meeting customer needs is incredibly imbalanced, to the detriment of customers. - Recent changes in strategic direction have resulted in the loss of key personnel and talent in upper management, engineering, and HR. - Annual adjustments are small, and there exists no formal process for internal promotions.