Pros
- fjorge is willing to pay for certifications - Most of your co-workers will be really interesting people who work their hardest
Cons
- High levels of churn raises red flags for what management these employees are working under. During my 6 months with fjorge, there were double-digit levels of employees leaving or being fired from fjorge. Most notably, all three leaders in the Managed Services department had left including: the Developer Manager, the Director of Project Management, and the Vice President of Managed services. In the Projects side, the Director of UI/UX had decided to seek other opportunities as well as several developers and three project managers and for half of my time there we were without anyone in the QA department because the former one had been fired. fjorge went without HR for at least one month because the Director of HR started shortly after I had. - Onboarding is hasty at best and non-existent at worst. While for some employees may enjoy the ambiguity of having to figure things out for themselves, this fosters a workplace that has increased errors and decreased efficiency resulting in lost profits. From the employee perspective, it creates undue stress while starting a new position. - Communication channels are plentiful and disorganized. While most companies will have a messenger app in addition to email, fjorge has email, Slack, channels dedicated to clients in Slack, client specific Slack workspaces, Jira, BaseCamp, BugHerd, frequent video calls, texts from clients, and more. Half of my day was searching for a request/information from either internal or external stakeholder through one of the many communication channels. - fjorge does a poor job at hiring, developing, and supporting leaders. While working at fjorge you will experience frequent gaslighting, if you were to ask why processes are the way that they are the most common answer is, "Because we've always done it this way.", and there will be a healthy dose of public humiliation if you make a mistake. My advice to prospective applicants is to skip fjorge. If prospective applicants were to have no other option but to work there, take care to get as much documentation as you can on every decision made, promises made, and anything that can help you push back against the abuse you will face here, then, find a new job as fast as you can.