Pros
Management is so incompetent, any qualified developer could basically receive a paycheck for free. They have good benefits. They will pay you basically anything if you can convince them you are qualified. Based on my interview, I've had interns that would have been capable of this.
Cons
Was the worst professional work experience of my life. I have a 13 year long Engineering Career, at over 9 different companies, ( over employed for about 5 years worth, longest employment 8 years, shortest, 3 month contract ), and will get a stellar review from every single one. This was the biggest joke of an operation I've ever seen. If your goal is to do the best job you can, make sure you ask management some questions. Any work you complete without their direct involvement will lead to aggravation and aggression. Management was primarily concerned with maintaining the fiction that they actually know what they are doing. They are smart and capable, but have never done any work on this scale before, and it shows. Don't attempt to address any topic that management is not familiar with. Management will get angry and yell. Example, don't make a comment about how code could be improved in a code review. If management is not familiar with the topic you are addressing, management will scream at you at standup, and tell you to take it offline when other employees enthusiastically ask for the details. Management is incapable of admitting to a mistake. They will not mentor you, mostly because they lack the knowledge and experience. The impression I always had, was that an intern just read a book and now believed themselves to be the expert. Management manages an extremely small team on a moderately sized project. And they never seemed to realize, they were speaking to a senior developer accustomed to managing several code bases several orders of magnitude larger than theirs, while also supporting and mentoring junior Engineers, dealing with vendors, customers, sales, service, and planning years long roadmaps. Any attempt to raise a concern was met, again, with anger and frustration. Management is prone to yelling. Now, I didn't much care. It's a small company, I can sit in my corner, and do the best job I'm capable of, right? Don't even think about it. All effort must go to reinforcing managements sense of superiority. No new employees that challenges managements expertise will be allowed to stay. Even if they spend every day, going out of their way to avoid confrontation, and always meet disrespect and aggression with apologies and grace. I just stopped participating in code reviews, because finding bugs in the code base only ever got me yelled at. If you don't/can't at least pretend to need to ask a question, expect to be harrased until you quit. The kicker, the thing that is getting them sued, is they don't seem to much care who is doing the firing or why. My technical leadership was extremely insecure about people more talented than them coming on the team. After 2 months of being disrespected for finding bugs in the code base, and completing tasks faster than expected without needing to ask questions, being tossed between projects and bosses without ever being told, being set up for failure with daily meetings... and succeeding, I was harrased and fired by an employee who 1, wasn't my boss, and 2, was specifically told to leave me alone when I complained. The last part of which, is why they will be hearing from my lawyer. In hindsight, I'm convinced management was either trying to get me to quit, or has some very weird narcissistic hang up about being in charge. Other members of management contacted me after the fact, basically begging for dirt on other members of management. You can expect this type of childish lack of communication. The impression I got, was that no one had any idea what they were doing, and did not want to admit it. Never once, did anyone think to ask, and I learned in the first few weeks, never to offer any suggestions. I suggested an exit interview, because I'm the type of person who likes to learn from my mistakes. I was invested in doing well at this company and could not for the life of me figure out what had happened. I was told that that was never going to happen. I very much got the impression that this is not the first time this has happened. Management and employees made many comments about their inability to find ANY competent developers. They told stories of developers that just left, without notice or word.
