Worst life-decision I ever made
Pros
They changed a 10 year culture of wearing business casual and no flex time, to a casual wear with flex time within 3 months of my employment. They improved their backend technology before I jumped aboard. Good health benefits. I absolutely loved the Lunch n Learns.
Cons
Overall, extremely pessimistic sentiment shared by the workforce; huge disconnect with the higher ups. The higher ups literally made comments to me about how they expect huge value even though they provide low pay. The information gathered from the interviewing process does NOT reflect what the employee will be doing once hired. When first hired, I received a laptop that kept on breaking. Apparently, other developers had the same problem with theirs. After much complaining, finally received a new laptop. However, when newer developers came aboard, they received similar problems to my experience. But since it was fixed on my end, that was the least of my concerns working here. Their front end is using extremely old technology with no progression or initiation for upgrading. This basically leads to the biggest problem: that while other companies are moving forward with technologies like JSON, Webservices, OOP patterns, this company will not provide that. If we had that, we'd be spending minutes instead of spending hours and hours writing code from the ground up, tweaking, and hacking. There are no frameworks only libraries with "workarounds" to providing technology that is not currently available to them. There are a few people in the higher ups, who I believe should not be working there anymore, since they are in a vital position that depends heavily on the future health of the IT department. The biggest problem I faced is the lack of communication. They put high blame on the employee without fixing their own short comings and being more approachable. Because of this, I was verbally abused, mentally exhausted, and went into extreme forms of depression. I was never rewarded for designs and extra components I added on my own time that helped improve the overall IT experience, instead, I had the opposite because of trivial matters; like punctuality and not submitting my TPS report on time. (Yes, you heard that correctly, TPS reports). This is the only way they know what I'm doing; the ones in charge of my advancement and roles in the company don't talk to me about my work, or check how I'm doing, they require me to do the work for them. Heck, the communication is so bad, I didn't even know what my boss nor his boss, nor my teammates, nor anyone in any other team were doing! I had no idea of the direction of my work and was kept in the dark about a lot of things I needed to know; so I had to ask the right questions to the right people. I was so micromanaged to the point that I kept myself reserved and mindful of my own work, rather than being outgoing as I normally am. Yet, I was the one who was had the "problem". In every job I ever worked, I received positive reviews (especially my current one) about my communication. VC talks "big" about communication, yet they reward people who don't talk much, do not provide input on how to improve cumbersome projects, and do just as they are told. Personally, I worked with a quarter of the IT department population, so there may be mixed views. But in my experience, new ideas and patterns to change the unmanageable code where met with high opposition with false claims on why they should not accept it and an unfounded fear of it. The fact that I received full blame for projects that doesn't work in production but works in qa and dev (even though I never had access to production). The pointless meetings. I'm just glad I don't have to deal with it anymore.