Pros
Tomis is a young Montana startup that is aiming to help tour operators achieve the both the quality and efficiency of marketing common to bigger companies that have billion-dollar marketing budgets. The resultant software and marketing product is an incredibly cool package, and really has helped clients increase their revenue by more than thirty-percent year over year. The CEO has an incredible vision, and I have no doubt that in another four years he’ll pull it off. This is due to the incredibly talented, intelligent, and hard-working team he’s built. These are people that put in sixty hour weeks because they just love what they do. My coworkers are all kind and incredibly interesting people, helpful and receptive to feedback. The culture here is the epitome of “work hard, play hard”. The office is incredibly dog friendly, always stocked with good snacks, and you can always expect bright smiles whenever you walk in! A generous fifteen-day PTO policy and the ability to work from home whenever you’re sick, as well as gym reimbursement and even a small-level of educational reimbursement (more so for small classes, not capable of subsidizing an entire degree yet) make work life all the more fun.
Cons
The people here are what make the job amazing, but there are always challenges at a startup. To begin, if you’re looking for industry-competitive pay, you might be disappointed. This isn’t to say that leadership isn’t aware and trying to remedy the issue, but it still hurts the company. The resultant high-ish rate of turnover (we usually have someone end up going elsewhere every few months) can make for a chaotic environment at times, and does make it difficult to view working at Tomis as a long-term investment. When further coupled with a lack of core benefits such as health, the decision to stay with Tomis becomes a matter of how much you’re willing to sacrifice for a gamble to “make it big”. Depending on where you are in your career, it may be easier to make this sacrifice if you’re younger and relatively unburdened by other life needs. There are also some fundamental communication issues between development and the rest of the team that need to be addressed. Development often works hard on a feature, only to have that work incorrectly disseminated to clients, and expectations set inappropriately. This is also due to that the development team hasn’t grown proportionately with the rest of the company. While we’ve acquired several new marketers or client representatives, the development team hasn’t grown in almost a year, resulting in an undue amount of stress and frequent panic to fix software issues caused by a breakneck release schedule. Newer features are often prioritized without any forethought being placed into testing or insuring their quality, and the lack of test-driven development results in reactive quality assurance measures and hours of painful manual regression testing. Disorganized development practices are beginning to cripple forward progress, and the failure of some members to fully test their own code can result in some finger pointing. This occasionally results in pronounced friction between the technical and non-technical sides of the company, as development struggles to explain why we’re encountering difficulty with a particular feature’s performance or why certain features take inordinate amounts of time to develop. The culture can also come across a bit immature. This isn’t to say we have nerf guns in the office, but the youth of the team (in terms of the age of the actual employees) shows, and could be off putting to those looking for a more professional environment. On the upside, this means dress is usually quite casual, and there’s a good amount of leeway regarding when you come into the office (more so for development). You’re expected to be an adult, get your work done, and the highly collaborative environment shines because of the lack of pretension and walls. However that lack of formality occasionally translates to some team members having obtuse hours and some college-like behavior. Finally, there’s a definite “one of us” and “us versus the world” vibe that, while in some respects warranted (Tomis faced an incredible amount of unwarranted opposition in getting to where it is today), that pride and protectionism could end up poisoning both the company’s culture and future business prospects. That isn’t to say it’s cultish (believe me, I’ve met companies like that), but it could end up warping the worldview of the company to a dangerous degree.