Pros
Skyward exclusively hires very young developers, often fresh out of college or with only a year or two of experience. This is great for new developers who are looking for that first opportunity to break into the field, and will teach some of the important business related skills needed to further your career. The pay is reasonable for the area and for inexperienced developers, the dress code is incredibly laid back, and the people are all great. There are decent bonuses and a few fun work events, as well as some good benefits from local area businesses. Development is almost exclusively C# on top of a SQL database, with some very rare JavaScript thrown in for certain areas. There is only one singular product for new developers and you will likely never have to venture outside of those languages, which greatly reduces some of the stress new developers can have trying to adapt to multiple systems and languages. There's a bit of barrier to entry, but after the first three or so months the development is relatively smooth. In recent years the training department has been overhauled as well which makes for a much easier onboarding experience. The immediate management at Skyward is excellent. I never felt like my voice couldn't be heard, and the open door policy you will be informed of on your first day always held true. I often got the feeling that those managers were not given what they needed to help their employees and the product, but not for lack of trying. The development staff feels very close knit overall and it was a great working environment.
Cons
As I said, this is a good first job but not necessarily one to stick with. Skyward uses a very custom framework and prefers to create everything in-house. For new developers there will likely be a period of about 1 to 3 years where learning that framework is intermixed with learning other development skills like OOP and other general skills, but a cap will be reached. After that point, the knowledge you gain will be primarily Skyward only (both custom framework and business knowledge). This lack of new opportunities can present a problem. The "transferable" knowledge of a developer who has worked at Skyward for 5 years may be equivalent to a developer who has worked elsewhere for only 2 years, even if they were of the same ability. This is hard to mitigate, since all developers work on the same product so there are no opportunities to transfer to different teams to learn new non-Skyward skills. This presents a problem for Skyward, one that seems to be leading to a decline. Because they exclusively hire new developers and many developers move on after a few years, the majority of the programming is done by inexperienced devs and may be the root of many of the issues their software has. Additionally, although many of the developers who have stayed longer are skilled, most have little to no experience outside of Skyward which does not facilitate the growth of new ideas. I often wondered if Skyward's policy of hiring new developers was to mask some of their poor programming practices. I never got a malicious vibe from any of those in charge, but it often nagged at me. Truthfully, Skyward's biggest problem is attracting and retaining talent. I've already covered the retention issue, but attracting new talent is equally as important. Before I left, they seemed to be hemorrhaging developers and their hire rates seemed abysmal for the growth the company was experiencing and pushing for. I can see two potential reasons for this: 1). Goal Misalignment - The last company meeting focused on an initiative to hire more customer service representatives. While that aligns with Skyward's image, it does not alleviate it's issues. Customer service reps are not the ones to fix the numerous bugs, or add the requested features. They can only handle those reports, but the bottleneck still exists within development. In fact, the mass hiring of inexperienced customer service representatives appeared to negatively impact the company (from my developer perspective), as it only increased the amount of questions developers needed to answer. 2). More Attractive Offers Elsewhere - It's impossible to talk about Skyward without also talking about the other big "S" company in the area. The unfortunate mentality at Skyward seems to be that moving up the road is an "upgrade", and never did I hear of a developer coming to Skyward from Sentry. Though Skyward is the less demanding job, it is only a small business trying to put on it's big boy pants and it's opportunities and benefits pale in comparison to the billion dollar giant across the highway. Many developers leave for Sentry, which often means information spreads about the better pay and benefits. It's also likely that many candidates pass on Skyward simply because of the location. Stevens Point is not a large town and many young people are more attracted to larger cities. In addition to all that above, staying at Skyward for an extended period of time is not very rewarding monetarily. The pay is fine for inexperienced developers, but raises and promotions are tied to a strict matrix that is heavily influenced by time and not individual performance. If a manager were to try to reward an exemplary employee, they would need to receive special improvement to give a raise that was even slightly more than their counterparts. The 401k option is also quite underwhelming. Though the vesting was changed recently to be more generous, the matching is 6% on a half dollar, which is pretty abysmal. Skyward has some issues, but I wouldn't discourage a new developer from applying. It's a friendly environment for starters and I don't regret my employment at all. I genuinely felt like the management was trying their best, even if they weren't able to pull it off.