Pros
The biggest pros are my colleagues. People that share the same passion as I have for the last 20 years. I find joy in being around, laughing with, and learning from them. There isn't a single person that works for Beatport that I would not call family. I simply cannot over-emphasize enough how great every single person that works in the organization is! 2020 has been a hell of a year, and Beatport has undergone quite a transformation from the top down. There is an inclusive culture that is starting to emerge within the company. Before the recent past, tough issues were sort of taboo to talk about, as a company, as it wanted to remain neutral. That seems to be changing for the better as courageous conversations are being brought to the forefront instead of getting swept under the rug. A people and culture committee has been formed to help make sure this culture is perpetuated. Beatport has also struggled with strong leadership in the past. A lot of the other reviews point out exactly how bad it was. I have been with the company for 11 years, and those other reviews are not wrong. I believe the wrong people were in the wrong positions because SFX did not understand the space it was invading. A lot of those people hired their friends to do sub-par work and it showed. Flash forward to today. Beatport has strong leadership that knows what Beatport is, why it exists, and where it's going. I am proud to be a part of the team that is literally defining what it means to be a DJ for the foreseeable future.
Cons
All of the changes to stronger leadership are not without their "growing pains". Even though Beatport is 16 years old, the company is entering into a pseudo-startup phase. The product roadmap is ambitious, to say the least. Deadlines for product development are usually very tight and, at worst, unrealistic. This is getting better as the Technology Team works closely with the Product Team to manage expectations but it still happens. There is a bare-bones dev team that has a lot of pressure to work on and maintain a full-stack, regardless of what specialty they were hired for. Staffing is supposed to be coming, though. It is hard to find capable people who also gel with the company culture, as there have been positions open for months. Lots of, in my opinion unnecessary, process has been introduced as if Beatport were an enterprise. I could see these processes being important if we ran 6 different dev teams with 20 devs on each team, but we don't and we aren't. Perhaps it will all make sense to me, one day when all the kinks get worked out. With any job, you have to take the good with the bad. And even with all of the bad throughout the years, my worst day at Beatport is probably better than my best day working at someplace I don't care about, spewing out mindless drivel.