Pros
I worked at CNL for just over a year. When I started it was going through a really rotten time with a lot of staff turnover and a lot of disorganisation. But in the last few months I worked there it really turned the corner. Pros are: There is now a great team of new line managers in testing and development who are very competent and have done a great job in sorting out the management process and the workflow. The new line managers have also been very good at actually looking after and supporting their team members - a massive improvement from how it was a year ago. There are a lot of keen, talented new starters as well as some very experienced people. They're a very friendly bunch and they all work well together. The business is growing very fast and there's a huge amount of room for future growth - they've struggled to manage that growth and the pressure it created for a while but they had finally gotten a good grip on it by the time I left. You will learn a lot working here and you aren't pigeonholed. There's lots of potentials for new feature development and new technologies to work with so they are very happy to let people go in the direction that best suits them. It doesn't matter if you're inexperienced - as long as you're passionate, keen to learn and willing to do something then management aren't shy of trusting you with responsibility. The pay is good and CNL is happy to hire enough people to get the job done - if there's a lack of human resources then they'll bring more people in rather than leave existing employees to struggle to pick up the slack. The product is genuinely world leading in its sector and the work you do will end up being used by some absolutely huge clients. What you do really makes a difference! There's also occasional opportunities for travel to client sites if you're a developer which can be a really beneficial experience in terms of career development. As long as you're open about things and do your job well, management are happy to be flexible and reasonable about personal circumstances that are causing you problems with work. They'd rather enable someone to be able to do their job than lose someone good due to excessive rigidity. Overall it's a good place to work with good people. It's not always been great in the past but it has finally turned the corner and is on a much happier, and much more successful, path now.
Cons
High staff turnover in the past has left a problem with institutional memory - there are some very experienced people working at CNL who've been there for years and years but you do sometimes get an issue arise where the people who worked on a feature or product area have left and you need to figure it out yourself without anyone being able to help. The business growth is huge which means more and more work coming into the pipeline but this is coupled with a large backlog of issues and work that's accumulated due to high staff turnover in the past. It's not a high stress environment but it's not a super-relaxing one either. There will be periods of crunch and they can sometimes arise at relatively short notice. This is a problem that has been getting better over the past few months but it's not solved yet. Management process is greatly improved but more still needs to be done - it can be frustrating when something that should have been caught early falls through the cracks and that impacts on your job but this is more of an occasional problem now rather than a regular occurrence. There's a lot of work to be done in terms of tidying up legacy code and implementing automated and unit testing. There's also a lack of documentation on some areas of the product which can cause problems on occasion - especially when it comes to knowing how to get third party hardware configured correctly. Because of how long it can take to hire new people, there are occasions where you might have to switch to helping with something outside your core area if there's a tight deadline coming up. This isn't always fun but it doesn't happen often and when it does happen it doesn't last for more than a few days.
