Pros
* Good benefits * Lots of good coworkers * Very generous vacation (if you can find time to use it) * Probably a good place for an internship or co-op. Some of the college kids working here make as much as some of the full-time employees who have been here for years and have established solid relationships with our customers.
Cons
* Lots of management but no leadership * Lots of talking but no communication * The company is extremely siloed, so problems are often tossed over the wall to someone else's silo rather than being fixed. * The software is developed with no input from the people who actually implement it in production, so time and effort is constantly wasted on both the development side and the implementation side. * Technology roadmaps are almost purely designed for buzzword compliance. They look good on the surface, but there is nothing beneath that surface. Each team is developing in isolation, so the modernization efforts are really about reimplementing the same bad designs with new stacks, rather than fundamentally improving the software portfolio. * Penny wise and pound foolish in a number of ways * Very little incentive for experienced people to stay -- raises are tiny and rare, not remotely keeping up with the cost of living. * Salaries that I'm familiar with are well below average for Austin, even compared to jobs requiring less experience. * The company is replacing experienced regular employees with interns, co-ops, and ever-cheaper contractors. Even after the layoffs stopped or, more likely, slowed down, there has been a steady stream of people quitting for better jobs. A lot of institutional knowledge is already lost, and that trend is likely to continue. * The only opportunity for career advancement is through attrition, but the entry level management positions aren't turning over much, and they don't pay much more than the positions they supervise, despite doubling the workload. Most of the management who have left were management from acquired companies who were marginalized by Nokia after the purchase. * This is a very frustrating time for people in development, services, and operations. If management has a plan for getting from where we are to where they're telling the market we are, they're failing spectacularly at communicating it to the people responsible for making it a reality.