Pros
• Nobody steals your stapler, and most days you’re left alone to quietly debug legacy logic in Excel with a side of existential dread. • Team morale is low-key solid. There’s camaraderie in the absurdity, like a digital foxhole held together by patch cables and caffeine. • Work pace is comfortable. You’ll have plenty of time between Teams meetings, tasking emails, and being voluntold to “modernize” a 2005 spreadsheet model without a budget.
Cons
• Compensation is very low. You’re told the ESOP is “the long game,” but that doesn’t help with rent, groceries, or rising insurance costs today. • Every day feels like “Did you get the memo?” day. You might be asked to outline a data strategy using SharePoint…through Internet Explorer…in 2025. • Promotion logic is opaque. Career progression seems more aligned to seniority, military proximity, or PowerPoint aesthetics than technical merit. • Leadership doesn’t speak code. Expect to explain REST APIs to someone who confuses JSON with a meal replacement bar. • Tooling is retro. Think Excel (non-cloud), C, C++, Ada, air-gapped environments, and running five app versions just to get one dataset to open. • Career growth is DIY. Want to learn Python? Hope you’re fine Ask Jeeves’ing it on your lunch break. • Contractual stability is murky. Base years end. Option years float. Forecasting your future feels like guesswork. • COTS recommendations are often ignored. Even when affordable, tested solutions exist, the default is to reinvent the wheel and usually not in round form.