Pros
I have worked as a software developer at Buckeye Interactive for 13 months, and I just put in my two weeks notice. Buckeye Interactive has a really flexible environment. Working from home is nice. They also give decent time off, and great 401k matching. They also recently added healthcare as a benefit option; however, it is very cheap, so your deductible for a single person is $6000 ($12000 for two people). The CEO/Owner of the company does his best to add benefits, and I was asked for my input about company benefits a few times. The profit sharing is nice, but I did not receive a dime until after my thirteenth month. Many of the projects I worked on were interesting. I got to help improve the company’s infrastructure, and I learned a ton about different technologies in the process. I really grew a lot as a developer over the last year.
Cons
Unfortunately, management has very different ideas about how a business should be run. The way company finances are run and the way employees are treated/compensated is not good. While I have been with the company, I have witnessed an astounding 50% turnover rate. People that were with the company 5-7 years were either terminated due to “performance reasons” (more on this later) or quit due to burnout. There seemed to be a common pattern, and someone quit or was fired about every 3 months. The company culture has seen several changes as a result: some good, some bad. Management has a habit of scheduling too much work. The software developers crunched the numbers and found out that all developers are at 125%-175% billable utilization (the exact number depends on the week). To put this number in perspective, developers at most companies are at 70%-80% billable utilization. Basically, developers at Buckeye Interactive would need to work 10-15 hours per day on billable work to even have a chance at meeting development deadlines. I have asked management to hire developers several times, and their response is that hiring another developer would not fix anything. Including myself, Buckeye Interactive has 3 developers at the moment. Ideally, 120 hours of work would be scheduled in a week for three developers; however, this number usually sits somewhere around 140-160 hours, and it does not account for the backlog of work that grows larger every week. In weekly work prioritization meetings, it seems like the same clients are pushed back every week. Buckeye Interactive has lost a few clients because of this behavior. Management continues to sell work and set deadlines that we cannot meet, and they do not listen to employees about workload. Client projects are either completed at sub-par quality or pushed back several weeks or months. In my last 1-on-1 meeting with the owner/CEO of the company, I was told that one solution to better quality and moving through the backlog was to work more hours. I told the CEO that I could not justify spending additional hours at work because the compensation was not worth it. I am a salaried employee, which means that I do not receive any compensation for working overtime. The CEO insisted that it was worth it due to profit sharing, and that my work would increase company profitability and my paycheck. I did the math. Buckeye Interactive usually bills developer time at $185/hr. If you do the math and calculate the profit sharing and splitting between employees (10% of company profits are split between non-management team members), I found that I would earn about $4/hr for each hour I put in over 40 hours. I would make more money working for McDonalds part-time after work. If putting in 50 hour weeks was necessary every now and then to finish a project, I would totally stay over and work to get the project completed; however, I don’t want to work 50+ hours per week due to a systematic business problem that will only get worse. As another review mentioned, management is not always honest with employees, and I believe this has contributed to the high turnover. In talking with a few other former employees, I found that their stories are similar to mine. I would not recommend working here to a friend.