Below-market salary, expensive insurance
Very proprietary technical experience centered around learning their specific POSSE system and the way coding works within that system. Being a developer here doesn’t prepare you with most of the technical skills you need for the industry at large, making it so that it’s very easy to get “stuck” here skill-wise. (You will get NO experience in: distributed systems architecture, CICD, automated testing, automated metrics tracking, containerization (Docker). If you have education or experience in OOD, some of those concepts will be shallowly applicable, but you are not often building anything complex enough to use the majority of them. It is very rare to have a piece of work where you are writing web services or creating an API. Occasionally, you may have an opportunity to code an interface using a third-party API, but these tasks are few and far between and hard to get your hands on.)
The company is moving toward being more focused on its specific COTS products, and they are a nightmare to implement for the Operations teams. Bug ridden, poorly architected, and the teams supporting them are perpetually understaffed.
Not an agile environment - developers aren’t grooming tickets and pulling work from a backlog. The tasks are created and assigned out by the team leads/project managers.
Mediocre work-life balance. Emphasis on billable hours with many responsibilities expected that are non-billable - this results in the company talking about how they value work-life balance a lot, but not practicing it. It’s very normal for people to work 50+ hour weeks regularly, especially in leadership roles. Moderately flexible on schedule - generally expected to be there for core hours of 9 - 3. Very resistant to remote work for most roles (including developers, technical leads, and project managers)
Very hard to get fired from here - poor accountability. Accommodations are made for low performers, and they weigh the organization down. This is presented as being a very kind and caring culture, but it makes it a very frustrating place to work for everyone else (especially high performers).
There’s a project-based bonus structure but it’s discussed internally between developers as a joke - the team can earn it or lose it based on things that are outside of their control, and they’re small. Usually only hundreds of dollars. Largest ever is a few thousand and that is very, very rare. Projects generally range from ~8 months to 3 years, so even the opportunity to get one of these small bonuses is rare. Annual bonuses ranged from small to non-existent.
They will tell you in your final interview that they are a company founded on Christian values. This is hanging on the wall and can be seen in their logo. (i.e. they don’t hide this.) In combination with this, a lot of hiring is done through referrals, which are largely either people in the same few families, or people who go to the same churches as those families. Combined, these factors result in a very white, straight, male workforce. This lack of diversity is manifested in the company’s culture. (It is a common joke that the company org chart should also come with a family tree.)
Management accommodates ultra religious conservative views on gender roles and it results in women being treated differently than everyone else:
Ex 1: I was scheduled to travel to a client site with a specific male coworker. He requested special accommodations (separate car, separate hotel - not room, entire hotel) because I am a woman. Rather than the company expressing to this coworker that professional travel was an expected part of their job and explaining the normal, professional arrangements, management arranged meetings to make me (as the woman) aware of the situation and that they would be providing whatever accommodations were necessary for the man. Management wanted to make sure I was okay, but this was fundamentally just not okay. I don’t believe I should have ever been made aware of that coworker’s request - our working relationship was forever changed by this.
Ex 2: For annual reviews, supervisors generally take their employees out to lunch (which is great). However, some supervisors were only treating the men they supervised to these one-on-one lunches. For the women they supervised, they would either ask a third-party to chaperone the annual review lunch, or order lunch for the woman to have in the office. When this issue was escalated to management, rather than the company telling these people that it is part of their expected duties to take any employee out for lunch one-on-one for their annual review regardless of gender etc, the company implemented a policy that if a supervisor was unwilling to take one of their supervisees out to lunch, that meant that particular supervisor couldn’t take any of their supervisees out to lunch, so that the treatment would be equal for any given supervisor, but not across all supervisors.
There is a higher-than-average concentration of the workforce here that has never worked for any other company. The overall workforce isn’t getting much “new blood”, so to speak, to provide new ideas from a variety of experiences. Leadership would like to see more innovation and tries to verbally encourage it, but it’s hard for new ways of thinking or new ideas to come into creation in such a homogenous environment.
