Pros
High pay Nice office Happy hours In 2018 in a city like New York where the tech industry is booming and opportunities abound, these perks are becoming more of a common find, though still have their merits.
Cons
Seniority Based culture _Some_ unwilling to help or outright rude team members Old tech Little product direction Many of the issues that are present in the tech department are due to the fact that RCA is at the top of the market and has little competition from more agile competitors. However, these issues still lead to a drab and unexciting work environment. This is mostly due to the fact that the development team was created fairly recently. The tech team’s job has just become the same recurring project (from project managers and leadership which were rarely present if at all) of reinventing the wheel which has been reinvented twice before. You may find in working here that the project some manager gave your team to complete is implemented in a legacy app, as well as two separate other apps that could be running in production without a single developer on the team having ever touched the codebase. One would think that with a larger more established company, the process of software development would be more concrete and thought out. However, due to leadership pushing deadlines upon the dev team, much of the architecture of the codebase is poorly or not thought out at all. Spaghetti code abounds, with a “research and development” team separate from the larger tech team containing developers who have little knowledge of Git best practices, this led to arguments, confusion, and resentment in the tech team as breaking changes would often be pushed out with no communication. As an individual, I found nearly no camaraderie from within my team. Most of my interactions with my direct coworkers when asking for help or even just attempting to connect on a personal level were regularly met with cold-shoulders, belittlement, or even mockery or aggression, this led to great uneasiness when trying to work my way through challenges without speaking to them.
