Pros
- The offices and facilities are first rate. - Parking is easy. - Though I've read to the contrary in recent reviews, I personally never felt much pressure and the management style was hands off which is good for me. - Nick Swenson is very intelligent and has the ability to inspire confidence under the right circumstances. He is knowledgeable technically and has good social and sales skills which make him a very valuable person in the business. - The diversity of projects lends to quickly learning new technologies and presents opportunities to become a more competent engineer. - Good place to grow as an engineer if you're in the early stages of your career.
Cons
- Identification of talent. As an example we had to let a senior technical employee go shortly into his service because of an extreme lack of knowledge. This was obvious to me from day one. This is quite a big mistake for several reasons. Firstly, letting people go always looks bad to your employees and therefore should be used sparingly, this was an unnecessary use of this tool. Secondly, engineers working under this person developed a negative opinion about management and their competence since they are both failing to recognize the engineer's competence and rewarding the incompetence of the senior employee. This signals to engineers that their performance and talent are not highly correlated to their compensation and position which lends to poorer productivity and looking for other opportunities. - Insecurity. Resolving the above mistake would have been easy if employees were frequently polled about their experiences at work. It seems like the primary reason this is not done is because of insecurity in being told that something is being done sub-optimally. - Penny-wise Pound-foolish. As business began to sag, cuts were made in an attempt to be viable. Cutting health and 401k benefits across the board can be upsetting to employees who have been working hard and have received positive performance reviews from management. However, at least this can be explained in the context of viability and longevity of a business model. Far more dubious are cuts to small benefits like a weekly employee lunch which can only be interpreted as cheap and petty. More alarming are announcements the company will be subletting office space to offset the costs of a poorly selected office. - Poor culture. The above is an example of one of the contributing factors to the poor work culture at Swenson He. Promised benefits like company retreats were never delivered upon because of apparent lack of funds. However, culture doesn't need to be expensive. Simple initiatives and cheap benefits can pay huge dividends for relatively low capital investments. The business ends up saving ~$10 per employee per week by cancelling lunch but given the very large (as a percentage of the workforce) number of people who resigned shortly after these changes, was the many thousands of dollars that had to be spent to find and train new employees really worth it? - Management structure. Non-technical (even technically literate) management in this line of work is extremely unadvised. Again I presume it's cheaper to hire non-technical managers but given their inability to contribute to the principal product and their inability to monitor progress from engineers (typing git log on the command line?) one has to imagine this is another case of penny-wise pound-foolish. Nick made someone who has no technical literacy the primary manager for all engineers, presumably because she is very complimentary. It's analogous to the way the president will hire someone who says nice things about him on TV (John Bolton?) and relates to the insecurity mentioned above. Many of the company's issues are unfortunately inherent. It is difficult to scale appropriately given the feast or famine nature of contractual app development the company engages in. This leads to many challenges which are not insurmountable but need to be approached with a more competent strategy. However, I believe the company is trying to be too many things at once and hence is suffering in an identity crisis that needs to be resolved . The company's slogan was once "never outsourced", now current employees tell me their primary role is managing developers in India.
