Pros
Diversity
I've never met a more interesting set of people in the core teams at NorthStar. Every day someone has a new story to tell and I miss many of the people I met there. I wish I could say the same about management but recently some measures have been taken to decrease diversity in the upper-hierarchy of the company.
Challenging Work
I don't think I'll ever get work on such a wide of range of technologies again. They might not have the most modern stacks but the product is so large that you'll go to build scripts, backend, web and frontend all in one day. You even get to dabble with an ancient Alpha DEC Unix server and Informix-4GL! It's rare to work on both modern and legacy technologies at the same time.
Good Location and Perks
The office is located outside of downtown in an commercial area near the airport. Free parking and not much traffic to worry about especially if you're familiar with the back roads. They've recently renovated their offices and it's nice clean space. Interesting mix between open concept and cubicle feel. Lots of perks like several coffee machines, vending machines and so on. The benefits are decent, especially the health insurance and they have a lifestyles rewards program.
Cons
Paltry Pay
They're very cryptic about salary before you get hired. Depending on your position, you'll get paid just above someone working in the retail industry. Raises result in very little increase in salary and even the very senior is making very little. You're only way of going up the latter is find another place to work.
At my last year at NorthStar, I was shocked to see several key senior developers been let go. Despite them being very qualified and having worked for the company for decades, the new management decided that they were no longer needed. I suspect they we're costly to employ and they'd rather get more inexperienced school graduates who can be given a poor salary and manipulated easily. The current team has very few experienced people and a swath of fresh graduates.
Inexperienced Management
The managers are the kind that have read too many Patrick Lencioni books. They care more about your presence in the office rather than your actual work. Even though they claim flexible hours and remote work you'll get reprimanded for taking advantage of it.
They try to implement modern software development processes without vetting if it fits their business goals. It more about trends and marketability rather than focusing on their clients. They're trying to be trendy when their main product is a 30 year old utility billing system.
The best part is everyone wants to be your team lead. The product owners, the support team, QA analysts, and even the software architects! You'll be thrown left and right as you try to work and everyone tries to shift your priorities.
Lack of Feedback Loops
Your performance reviews will be solely based on an arbitrary rubric that the director came up with in an afternoon. Rather than it be based on expectations and quality of work, it is based on what technical skills you have. They think that everyone needs to a SQL master to become a senior developer when not everyone is destined to become a backend developer.
Asking your team lead for specific advice is fruitless. You will not be told how to improve. At best, you will be reprimanded when it's too late. I've known a few who've been let go without ever receiving feedback from their leads or given a chance to improve. According to their company policy, one will be given advance notice if their performance is not up to their standards. That rarely happen, people disappear regularly very suddenly.
You're asked to write your goals every year but they will be promptly forgotten and never reviewed. Rather than improve yourself they'd rather you just sit and churn code for the rest of your life.
People are treated as resources
I started working at NorthStar when it was small team and when it was so understaffed that the previous director worked 16 hour days and did management, HR, software architecture and development all at the same time.
The team was a tight nit family and we had a very high throughput. People were assigned tasks based on their skills and frame of mind just like they're supposed to be.
Fast forward a few years and it's different story. Now employees are called 'resources' and simply quantified in man-hour units. It doesn't matter what your personal goals are or what you're interested in.
Overtime
In the IT world, incidental overtime is an occasional occurrence. You're notified in advance and compensated with vacation time or similar. Not at NorthStar! I've stayed late so many times that I've become friends with the cleaners and know them by name. I will never forget when the whole team worked 5 weekends in a row and the director insisted that we get compensated. Our compensation? A box of donuts! I didn't know that 80 hours of work on holiday was worth 10$ to them.
