Avantages
Coworkers were great to work with. Really smart, helpful, and motivated teammates.
Work/life balance was always good. I was never overworked and I usually got off after I worked my shift for the day.
Remote working environment. This is more an expectation than a pro, but still, I’ll add it in.
Inconvénients
Management. I liked my “manager”, who was technical and intelligent, but never had a chance to interact with them. My actual manager was a project manager, who was not technical but still judged performance. It was a weird setup and I was not a fan of it.
I wasn’t provided a computer and has to use my own MacBook, which I didn’t mind all too much but it didn’t require some surveillance software to be installed. That tipped the scales into the company just being cheap in my opinion. Obviously there was no way phone option or partial reimbursement option for a personal phone, I had to use my personal phone, install surveillance software, and pay the bill completely out of pocket.
There were other cons like the corporate expense system that worked solely through reimbursements once a month, so flights, travel meals, hotels, etc are all out of pocket until the end of the month.
The time reporting system for salaried employees was annoying, buggy, and I couldn’t stand it.
Health insurance options were terrible.
The 401k matching was almost nothing. It was so absurdly low I didn’t even see a point in them offering it.
There were no other retirement plan options other than the useless 401k.
Buffer between an employee and the CEO was nearly nonexistent. The CEOs expectation was that every employee, even a technical engineer, be salespeople and create money making opportunities for the business. Basically, everyone was expected to “upsell.” Not a huge con but it still made me feel insecure in the company’s future.
A short little story about the PM manager I had. The PM told me one time he felt I had an attitude about a task I was assigned (which is something I’ve never heard from any previous or future manager, I really enjoy the field I work in) and I spent a good 10 minutes on the phone explaining to the PM how this was incorrect and that a task at work isn’t impactful or important enough to upset me, I’m just not the type of person that allows anything to do with my job affect my emotions, and how I liked working with him (which at that point was genuinely true), the rest of the team, that I enjoyed the type of work I was doing, and how I was a bit disappointed in my own experience with that particular task at the moment he referenced. By the way, I didn’t actually say anything that warranted questioning my attitude. It was my tone, I guess? He basically ignored everything I said, all of my compliments, and the overly positive attitude I had to communicate to correct his opinion, and instead he kept his opinion and things were never the same again. After this, it felt like he had it out for me and he consistently questioned everything I did, rarely gave credit when things went perfectly, and only focused on any minor mistake I made.