Pros
You'll learn what not to do. Good benefits.
Cons
If you are in technology and thinking about working here: stop, turn around, and run. Heed the warning signs you'll see during recruiting, like the little delays, the off kilter interviews with possibly random people, the lightweight questions – it just won't seem right. But if you do end up getting past the interviews, and it is not that hard, and you accept the lowball offer (seriously), your journey will begin with little preparation for your arrival. You're lucky if your accounts are setup the first week. You won't have a desk – find one yourself. Don't be surprised if they ask you to bring a personal laptop for a while, as on average, it is three to four weeks after you arrive before you'll get a company issued one – but you'll probably want to keep using yours anyway as the company issued one will be 7 years old with the battery falling out and the 'a', 'e', 'r' and 'h' keys rubbed off because the last person ate greasy food over the laptop while working at their desk. The reason for the lack of preparation is that the HR department has inept management and therefore you have to basically handle problems yourself – like getting errors in benefits corrected in a reasonable timeframe. You'll quickly realize that the terribly run HR department is the least of your problems though. There is a reason that no CTO has lasted much longer than a year since 2008. The executive ranks in technology are a revolving door with people either fired or leaving to end their misery. The company is now trying to put in executives that came up the project management ranks (i.e. control freaks that lack technical knowledge), so you'll find that any strategy or planning is disconnected from reality because developer feedback is not understood – or perhaps just dismissed due to a top down management style. Don't outwardly challenge though, because you'll quickly be out of a job (an actual turn of fortune you'll eventually be thankful for). You'll find that the technology group suffers from bozo expansion. Being new, even if you are average, you'll still be the strongest and smartest person there by a longshot because anyone with talent has left. (Hint: ask those that interview you how long they have been there.) It's possible you'll enjoy that at first, as who doesn't like to be the master of the universe, but you'll quickly realize you would be more productive planting garden flowers with your dog than trying to code with your peers. How could this be? Well, this is a publishing company. It is full of "book people", many of whom haven't talked to their desk neighbors in years, but are completely comfortable hiding behind their screens firing emails off to executives (cc: CEO) about his/her end-of-world problem or that someone in QA looked at them wrong. Many of the people -amplified by the company culture- do not understand what it takes to be a technology company. The manifestation of this problem will be your job: a few years ago they figured they needed to build a learning platform because customers were demanding it and competitors had been investing in these platforms for quite some time. So Macmillan hired a consulting company, referred by someone on the board who knew a guy who knew a guy, to build the single worst platform that way too much money could buy. It's horrible. Old technology. Monolithic. Sluggish. Full of bugs. Things just plainly don’t work half the time. Your job will more than likely be consumed with fixing the mistakes of other developers –who are no longer there– while dealing with the outcry of people in the rest of the company that don't understand technology and want to know what your problem is for "building in all these bugs" – "huh, me? I'm still trying to get wireless to work and fix the oversized tax withholding in my paycheck." And if that was not difficult enough, the Product team is a whole other group of characters – many with little product owner experience. They are emotional basket cases and the leadership has thinner skin than Donald Trump with a pervasive sense of paranoia. What makes people's lives miserable though is that this team has no problem playing dirty politics and will go up to the highest positions to get their way or deflect blame – so any sense of collaboration with Development has been killed by their political assassinations. Finally, the CEO favors people that can communicate really well. Although this is certainly not a problem in of itself, when it is the only thing you value, you get a team of people that can speak well, but play slip service to each other and the organization without actually accomplishing anything. If all this still doesn't turn you away: look at the industry. In a world of Wikipedia and self-publishing, the only thing this company has to survive on is a learning platform. But it doesn't work and is way behind the competition. And don't expect your bonus because revenue targets will always just miss as the company bleeds out and has a slow death.
