It all depends on your team. I've had the worst manager of my career here and also the best. I've been able to work with some amazing people and some that didn't do anything. Paylocity hires for the company as a whole so you have no say in which team you join. So it will all be the luck of the draw. You may get a great team under a great director. Or you may get a manager and director that only want to hear sunshine and rainbows and will try to push you out if you challenge them.
Have to be very political to get promoted, training allowance seem to change every year and it becomes more difficult to get training approved. Far too many team pivots and changes in direction causing teams to waste their time. Too many layers between teams and CEO causing teams to spend time building something while being told that CEO / upper management is on board only to show the work to CEO and be told to start over because the UI is wrong or thats the wrong problem or not a priority.
If your team is working on a highly visible product then MVP becomes Maximum Valued Product instead of Minimum Viable Product. The team will create a release plan / road map and show it to leadership and get their sign off, but then the next day/week somebody from leadership will have some great idea and the team will be expected to force that new thing into the existing roadmap. If you complain too much and try to push back you get labeled as negative and there goes your chances of getting promoted.
Contrast that with if your team isn't working on anything highly visible then it can take months just to get a simple direction on what you should be working on and you will probably be understaffed.
There is a strong culture of 'not built here' when discussing new technologies and approaches. Tech leadership seem to think PCTY has all kinds of problems that no other company has dealt with so every solution must be written in house. Since everything is title based only those in tech leadership have any real say in if technology X gets adopted.
I can't tell you how many times we have started some big architecture only to be stopped half way through because either 'business conditions changed' or 'it's good enough now'. Which means there is no consistent pattern and the local development experience can be a nightmare.
