Pros
1.) Decent pay (for the time, but not great) 2.) It was a decent stepping stone, for my career
Cons
Bearing in mind, I was actually an early employee, however, what I write here is still fairly common of the tech industry... 1.) Nepotism 2.) Nepotism 3.) Refusal to promote from within, when internal employees have already proven they deserve it (see also : nepotism) This is coming some years late, but, looking over the now nearly 20 years of my career, I'm reflecting back, and there are a few things I feel need saying, if only for myself... I was, aside from a Full-Stack Engineer, the defacto UI / front-end lead, as I was already making the implementation and (programming) design decisions, as well as putting in the actual programming work, and providing, almost solely, UI-level consulting for the rest of the team. I was the GSP, JS and CSS expert on the team. Despite that, I asked only for a bump to Senior Engineer. They said they had no senior positions available, only to double-face and hire the position out of nepotism, by hiring a friend of one of the architects. Sad, really, as their friend and I were quickly friendly and got along well. However, My work still outpaced his, I knew the domain and tech stack, and he would regularly come to me for assistance. Being that they passed me over for promotion, I resigned and accepted a senior position across the street (literally). This bred resentment amongst the directors and executives, including the C-Level, who, one at a time, passed my desk, asking me, in uncomfortable tones, why I was leaving them, as if they didn't know, already. They knew full and well, but, I told them, anyhow, that I didn't like being passed over, in favor of nepotism, esp. when I was already doing the actual work! In reality, they had a pretty big chip on their shoulder, and no business even asking, let alone festering resentment. Mistreat someone and find out! Also, the condescending attitude of several director and executive-level. I'll repeat what I just wrote, in the previous paragraph, about carrying a huge chip around. At a point, one of the C-Level executives took us out, after work, to meet two of the project Shiro founders. I was already familiar with Shiro, as I was building an open source CMS, with a use case which required programmatic configuration, which wasn't done at the time (early in the project), and had no documentation. They were interested in my approach, so they and I struck up a conversation. He looked on incredibly uncomfortably, as they took notes. It was one of several instances where I felt like I bruised his ego a bit. Not intentionally, mind you! Lest I need to mention someone carrying a chip on their shoulder, for a third time! At another point, I was to attend a yearly Groovy + GRAILS conference, sponsored by the company, and was promised by leadership that I would be able to attend uninterrupted, only to miss two hours editing one of our project features, due to a mistake made by the web / graphic designer. At another point, someone else wrote a Glassdoor review about the fact that the company was run by germans, hiring only other germans, which they, in turn, interpreted as WWII-style anti-german sentiment, and wrongly accused me of writing that review. I had, as a matter of fact, not written any reviews, by that time. I'll say this : we also had one spanish individual and one french on staff, in leadership roles. The rest were indeed german - I take no issue with this, in and unto itself, but if you're operating in the US, you're heavy-handed with the nepotism, are hiring ONLY european for senior and higher leadership roles, and most of those are, indeed, german, I think it's neither unexpected nor unreasonable that someone would be critical of it. Likely, they, too, deserved better than what they got, and what they got was nepotism, which I found to be thankless and insulting, as well. All-in-all, I didn't feel as if my work was appreciated, or that, despite the pace and quality of my work, I was respected. Then again, working as someone who came out of the lower class, into an industry dominated by the privileged middle and upper-classes, I think I've felt a bit of this, throughout my career.