High Pay, very high stress, and some deceit
Pros
The company's base salaries are a 15-20 % higher than the average market rate for the same job. The company pays for free starbucks coffee, lunch from a shop, and provides all of the right tools and equipment if it's a reasonable request. The company provides very high end laptops and encourages people to share their ideas with each other. You are expected to learn and pick a lot of new things. What you have learned will not be wasted here. The company tries to create a culture of being frank, open and honest with everyone. The vision of the company is to develop a set of configurable blocks and be able to 'glue' (ie. integrate) them on the fly. The data model is dynamically defined and all the code pertaining to it is created very quickly using templates.
Cons
Having said the above, the workload and expectations are easily 40-50% higher. Working wee hours into the night is commonplace and employees are so overwhelmed that they don't have the time to take anyone's ideas no matter how good they are. There's a product improvement backlog building from 3 years. The new trend of off-shoring to cheap indian programmers has taken hold firmly. So the work never stops. It happens around the clock. If, as a new employee you care, the clients are sold on one vision (with a very impressive, visually appealing and fast loading demo). But everything in reality is bubble gum, duct tape, and dumpster full of lies. Thousands of undocumented lines of code are in the system, and gigabytes of code generated taking up to an hour to compile things. As a prospective employee you should care that, sometimes the top management expects you to be able to read minds. If not, you will be shouted at. The strange motto is: "You don't need training, hands on exercises, nor a curriculum with our tools (that don't fully work) to be able to learn how to apply them. Use your high salary to figure them out."
