Loads of potential, but consistently falls short of greatness.
Pros
Like the title says, there is loads of potential - MaxMind has some great products and with proper management, the company could really take off. Being a very small company, there is ample opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, and management will generally encourage any interest shown in a particular aspect of the business. Also, there is a lot of potential to influence new product offerings during weekly collaborative meetings and the (presumably) annual summit. There is also a decent degree of flexibility in terms of working remotely if need be.
Cons
Sadly, the cons of working for MaxMind significantly outweigh the pros. An exhaustive list would likely overrun the character limit for the review, so I'll constrain it to these three major areas: 1) Management This is where MaxMind really falls down - in many cases, the lower level, client facing employees have more work experience and a better grasp of how the company works than their immediate superiors. Add to this a lack of detail orientation and follow through in positions in which it should be requisite and it quickly becomes apparent that any issue that is escalated will be ineptly handled, and eventually end up on your plate again, in a worse state than when it started. Additionally, while management is typically willing to listen to suggestions on how to improve processes or the distribution of work, this never results in any sort of positive outcome, and the best you can hope to achieve is to be placated with a half-baked solution which gets adopted and then dropped within a few weeks. There is also a real feeling that the management team is learning as it goes and in some cases, winging it when it comes to company practices. While this might be acceptable in a brand new start-up, MaxMind is over a decade old and should have passed beyond those growing pains years ago. Needless to say, anyone who has spent any time in a well managed company will find this worrisome. 2) Hiring practices: The tendency on this front has been to either hire by recommendation of current employees or solely through ads placed on craigslist and college job boards. While none of these methods are necessarily bad per se, at least for the client services and management side of the business, it hasn't exactly resulted in hiring employees with loads of work experience. Part of that is tied into salaries being offered, but overall there exists a serious lack of drive to seek out and pay for exceptional talent for open positions. Also there seems to be a disconnect on what positions need to be created/filled vs. what existing positions and departments could be better supported with the addition of new employees. 3) Salary: While starting wages are decent for people fresh out of college or making the transition from retail or the food service industry, they are by no means competitive if you have any degree of previous professional experience. For those of you who are inclined to take any job that pays in this economy, be forewarned that there is also a lack of annual raises - raises are in theory based on merit, but in practice the reality is that you have to either be a friend of the owner, or subscribe to his ideology. The result of all this is that many employees tend to not bother going the extra mile for a client or each other since there is no incentive to do so.
