Pros
- They're pretty much always hiring, which means you can find full time employment in North Bay as a software developer - Some people you'll work with are amazing. Intelligent, willing to help you out and easy to form friendships with - The business side of things is going very well so there is a decent level of job security - The annual christmas party is a lot of fun - The benefits package has so-so dental coverage (if you need light work or regular cleanings, you're going to pay only around $25 - $50/yr) - Washrooms are private (1 person per washroom)
Cons
- If you enjoy learning and using the latest and greatest in development technologies and skills, look elsewhere. They are firmly seated in the OpenEdge 4GL world with IBM AIX servers. Both are miserable to work with long term and have an extreme lack of 3rd party/community support. This means when you inevitably have an issue trying to implement something in OpenEdge 4GL, it's nearly impossible to find a solution online - The culture is quite literally toxic. There are company wide meetings when people make mistakes so that they can literally be strung up in front of the entire company and told how "stupid" they are. The owner also has wild rules regarding which types of dishes are allowed in specific rooms in the building and will call you out if you slip up and forget the specifics - Upper management will claim they want to make FDM4 a better place to work, but after many suggestions and situations where people ask for changes - they never put their money where their mouth is. In the defence of a couple of people who are upper management, they seem to be onboard with wanting changes for the better - but nobody can convince the owner or his son to implement said changes - Starting compensation is much too low and it'll take you at least 3 years (possibly more) in order to start making decent money. This is because the turnover rate is so high that upper management thinks nobody under 3 years is worth giving a raise to. Beyond these issues, compensation is directly tied to how many billable hours you logged in your time entry. Some people might say this makes sense that if you make the company more money, then you directly deserve more. The real issue with this situation is that you have zero control over what you work on and whether you are assigned billable work or not. This means there's a lot of amazing developers that just don't receive the compensation they probably deserve - There's no profit sharing or any incentive for you to want the company to do well each year. The owner will proudly tell everybody that the company did very well last year and that everybody should be happy about this, but since there are no bonuses or profit sharing, you will not see any benefit. If anything, it means you are going to be expected to work harder and harder as more clients sign up. This leads to most experienced people doing the bare minimum as if they work harder, they are rewarded with more work - Every 15 minutes of your day is logged via the internal time entry application. This is supposed to be done in order to allow easier billing to clients. What ends up happening is that some days are so hectic that it's nearly impossible to accurately log your time for the day. Beyond this, you're also expected to write details about what you actually worked on for each task. Fair enough you might say to yourself, but the problem is that there's a fine line between "there's too much detail the customer doesn't understand and complained about why they were billed" and "there's not enough detail, the customer doesn't understand and complained about why they were billed". I don't know many Software Developers that want to be partaking in creative writing on a daily basis - There's a serious work/life balance issue at FDM4. "Mandatory" overtime has happened quite a few times because sales/upper management promised features that quite literally didn't even exist, but they were sold to new customers. This leads to a lot of stressed out people who produce low quality implementations which leads to more work in the end with all the follow up bug reports. On top of all of this, you might be "asked" to travel on-site to a client's warehouse or headquarters for a "go-live". None of your travel time is compensated and you will most likely be flying out of North Bay at 5:30AM and getting home on a Saturday at 12:30AM. Did I mention that the work day is 8AM - 5PM? It doesn't seem like a huge issue at first to work those hours rather than 8AM - 4PM or 9AM - 5PM, but it quickly wears you down and causes you to become endlessly stressed out. Apparently upper management never got the memo that productivity drops off after 6 hours of work