Pros
I worked for Kronos in the Engineering Organization for almost 15 years. The following are positive aspects of working at Kronos: - Recently, the Engineering Organization has been taking greater strides over the past couple of years in understanding the customer perspective when designing the product, both from a functional and performance perspective. There were times in the past where this was not the case in Engineering but I saw steady improvement in this area over the last couple of years of my tenure at Kronos. - Kronos compensates employees who perform. During my time at Kronos, I would work long hours especially when it came to solving customer problems and I was awarded for that hard work from a financial perspective. - The people who worked at Kronos were awesome, both from a technical and personal perspective. My leaving Kronos was purely a career decision. However, I would consider many of the people with whom I worked at Kronos to be friends versus just co-workers. - The leadership at the top is sound. Aron Ain was one of the reasons I stayed as long as I did with Kronos because he was one of the only CEOs I knew where I always thought he was sincere in what he said. He also genuinely motivated employees to go the extra yard in making Kronos successful. He was also someone who was approachable and actually knew you by name. It is in big part his leadership that has made Kronos the "Billion Dollar" company it is today. In addition, the recently hired Chief Product Officer Jim Welch has been instrumental in establishing more of a customer focus within Engineering.
Cons
The following were some of the negative aspects of Kronos: - From a career perspective, I felt as though there was no place to advance as my desire was to be a technical leader versus a manager of people. While I worked very hard and delivered much to Kronos, I was never seen as someone who could be promoted to the next level. After a while, that became an impediment that factored into my leaving Kronos so I could advance from a career perspective. - During the last 5 years, there was more of a movement to take much of the Development work being done in Chelmsford and move it off-shore. With that movement came the dismissal of many great employees who made the product successful. This movement also resulted in some of the products suffering from a quality perspective due to the off-shore teams not coming up to speed quick enough to be independent, especially since senior resources in the US with domain knowledge were let go. - Some of the middle management within Engineering struggle with how to manage people. I believe it is a case of taking technical resources and putting them into management roles so they can advance in their careers. I would advise more management training to help these resources become more effective. - There is sometimes too much overhead and bureaucracy when going through a Development cycle. For each new Sprint, there were times where teams would meet for a full day to establish what work was to be done for the next three weeks. In some cases, there were more meetings than actual Development work.