Pros
I love working at Drvietime. It is mostly a young to middle age crowd in the IT department. This lends itself to lots of energy and excitement about what they are working on. I am in the twilight of my career of 30+ years of working in one way or another with databases. I started just over 3 years ago at DriveTime when I got tired of traveling for my old job and I have not regretted the switch yet. I love being a mentor and trainer of the young database developers and now and then they teach me new tricks as well!! I also get to use the skills I have honed over my many years in the field doing what I love to do, making things faster and better for accessing data. I have never been bored at DriveTime. There have been times I have been stressed from a bit heavy a schedule, but I found my leader understanding when I needed to flex a bit to keep my sanity. And the heavy schedule is not constant. DriveTime does a good job of encouraging you to have an outside life (compared to what I experienced in other companies). I love using KanBan to manage work. So much better than writing weekly status reports for a boss that never read them. Instead we do a quick 5-15 minute stand up each morning to understand where projects are at and what is next to work on. The main office uses a very open environment. That took a couple of weeks to adjust too, but now I would not trade it for anything. I love how if I am feeling tired in the morning, just walking into the energy of the office rejuvenates me. I have never felt freer to share my thoughts and feelings with management than at any other place I have worked at in my long career. Another reviewer warned against doing that implying you would get fired. I have not seen that to be the case in almost 4 years. However, management does not suffer incompetent workers for long. If someone is not or cannot do the work, then yes they are let go. Far better than what I have seen in other places I have worked at where they kept the people and everyone else had to pick up the slack. One place I worked at took over a year to document how a guy would play video games all day long instead of working. DriveTime would have given the guy a couple of warnings and then walked him to the door, all within at most a couple of months. Personally, I prefer the DriveTime way. I have also not seen any type of cronyism. I don’t do golf or watch sports or go to bars like a lot of others at work, but I have not felt my lack of shared outside activities with management has affected my standing at work. They respect me for my abilities in the work place not my chumming up with them after work. One of my favorite management things at DriveTime is how thin the layers are. Between me and the CEO is just two layers. And he knows my name, what I look like and stops by to chat. I even feel like I could go talk to him if I needed to about anything. At one time I worked at GM and trust me the CEO there did not even know I existed. I have found I like working for a smaller company. We get state of the art technology to work with. Two very large screen monitors at our desks to use with our speedy laptops. There are huge monitors in conference rooms you can use to share your desktop during meetings. We have lots of white boards, some even on wheels. We are up on SQL Server 2012 though we still have some old 2000 and 2008 to migrate off of. We each get a mobile device for free. And the office has the newest versions of MS software. Last, I am a woman and even though it seems that the IT field in this part of the US is heavily male dominated, we have four ladies in the database developers group (out of 13 total) and are treated with respect and I have not felt any favoritism affecting the members of our group. I would recommend working for DriveTime. Trust me the grass is not greener in other companies.
Cons
Sometimes I feel like management is like the dog in UP when it sees a squirrel while talking to the man and boy. They need to learn to not always chase after the next shiny thing just because it is new.
