Pros
I started off excited, moving across the state to get my first "big company" job almost 10 years into my career. The first few months were filled with shadowing, learning, and making friends. The company lacks any sort of documentation solution... forcing you to think on your feet and develop some critical thinking skills. I thrive in these types of situations, so I quickly became aclimated and began mentoring new employees on the team. I also tried (and failed) to write some documentation. I've developed some good friends at Atomic - people I plan on staying connected to for a lifetime.
Cons
The joy quickly faded as I became the go-to engineer for dumping projects on that others either couldn't do or didn't want to do. I regularly hit 60-80 hours in a pay period billed, with another 5-10 hours of non-billable time. This would spike to over 100 billed in a few cases. Documentation? The elusive buzzword that management wants you to create, but when you spend non-billable time doing so, results in you getting disciplined for not billing enough. Management can insist that "if you're thinking about the client, you can bill the client" all they want... but in my new position as a client of Atomic Data, I can tell you right now that if an engineer billed me 6-10 hours for "documentation", I would not be paying that invoice. "Well, just document as you go!" That's not happening when every single thing you do is either overdue tickets that need immediate attention, or is a fire you need to extinguish. And what about the documentation that isn't client specific? What about making a standardized Windows Server or RHEL image to speed up deployments? Management will dance around the fact that they don't want to prioritize automation because it'll cut billable... which is why the product operations team has fully automated a lot of internal processes, but the professional services team hasn't automated a thing. Training? Not much, apart from cookie-cutter high-level topics on certain technologies. The training team deserves credit, though - it was high quality content that they had to piece together with very little support from upper management. They did what they could with what they had. The "lab" that our team had to test and learn with was a bunch of 15 year old servers running ESXi 6.X with a bunch of failed drives. No documentation on credentials, procedures for determining what was safe to delete/touch, or who was responsible for what. A colleague and I tried and tried to get this to change for months, leading a training course for the NOC team for aspiring engineers. Many of our lessons either completely failed due to overburdening the degraded RAID arrays on the hosts, or exhausted the RAM due to four or five people trying to run their VMs at the same time. For a company with half a city block worth of datacenter in their basement, this was pretty disappointing. Back to workload - management pulled me aside on numerous occassions after it was clear I was about to have a mental breakdown to "encourage" me to slow down. After three years, I was finally promoted after other people on the team left for greener pastures. The reward? A small raise and the ability to bill at the higher rate for the company. A few months down the line, my high workload was brought up again and the newly hired manager (who has since been laid off... ironic.) suggested that it "might be best for me to go back" to my previous position to reduce stress... which makes no sense as I'd still be working as many hours, still mentoring new employees, and still billing at the new rate regardless, all while earning a lower salary. Hard pass. When a client approached me about leaving, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in years. HR danced around the topic when I inquired about the offer, stating that they would happily help me write my resume if I didn't think I was a good fit for the company, but under no cirumstances was the offer from the client going to happen. Atomic did not make it easy to leave, even though their non-competes were outlawed and their non-solicitation agreement they make their clients sign was also recently outlawed. This didn't stop them from trying to sic their legal team on me and the client until they finally caved... with the caveat that the client would have to "buy me out" for nearly $200k. Thankfully, they eventually dropped that request and pretended that they had a change of heart, and that the company "had my best interests and career goals in mind". Keeping in touch with friends and former colleagues has been eye opening. The company has had multiple rounds of layoffs - their entire software development team at first, but they've recently laid off 25+ people across the company. My former colleagues are drowning in the increased workload and I am writing a bunch of recommendation letters. Multiple directors, multiple managers, and a ton of valuable resources (some with 15+ years of tenure and institutional knowledge!!!) have been thrown to the curb. Many clients are going to be feeling the hurt when they discover that their account manager, architect, engineer, or technicians are suddenly "no longer with the company" due to "economic concerns" (e.g. the board's christmas bonus) and their undocumented mission critical system is down. Oh well, at least they can still make money on the war room that gets spun up because no one knows what to do! Such a shame. I didn't love Jim Wolford, the former CEO who passed away, but he had a vision, and he could rally a team together behind a common goal. Chris Heim, the new CEO,is the *exact* type of leader you'd picture in your head when you hear that private equity being brought into a company - very charismatic, with all of the fake promises of growth, the constant reassurances that "we're family" and that "you belong here, while he simultaneously sends an ominous email with the entire company BCC'd at 4:59 PM telling you to stay home tomorrow and to attend this mysterious "Company Update" meeting the next morning, where you find out your life was destroyed right before thanksgiving. Classy, guys!