Great place to work, with some definite adjustments needed.
Pros
+ SwitchThink has created an interesting culture that is a a meld of the "parent" Desert Financial and a more tech-oriented startup. In some ways you get the best of both worlds - the stability of a larger, well-established, organization with projects where you can actually make a difference and be heard and not just be a number on the payroll. + Employees are friendly and management is usually very approachable. + The tech stack on the application side is pretty new for a financial institution for the most part - the latest .NET Core with Vue.js on the front end, plus SQL Server with a little PostgreSQL sprinkled in. + Probably the best benefits you’ll find outside of working for a Fortune 500 company. Insurance costs are low for individual/family and the company HSA contribution is generous. Vision and dental are great as well, as well as FSAs, etc. + 401K matches at 100% for the first 3% and 50% for the next two percent, so if you contribute 5%, they match at 4%. Of course, you can always contribute more, but their max contribution is 4%. + Tuition reimbursement is great, especially if you’re interested in taking an undergrad degree. All online bachelors degrees at ASU are covered 100% by the company and you don’t have to pay anything upfront. You can take anything, it doesn’t have to be related to your job. Master’s degrees get $10k/year paid for, which, unfortunately, doesn’t go very far on many Master’s, but it’s $10k less than you’d spend, so not bad either way! + Lots of days off throughout the year for bank holidays and you get an increased amount of vacation days depending on the years of service you have, which is awesome. There are also 2-3 “floating” holidays throughout the year when a holiday falls on a weekend and you get an extra vacation day you can take throughout the year. + Especially over the past year working from home during COVID, a real effort has been put in to reduce meeting throughout the week and keep employees working on projects rather than sitting through long meetings. + Autonomous work environment where no one’s breathing over your shoulder. Management trusts you’re getting your work done and the PMs are there to help remove blockers if you need them. + STS and DF are very mindful of your life outside of your job and, while there may be times when you’re doing more work than usual in order to hit a tighter deadline, they generally try to make up for it later and are appreciative of your efforts. + Great work/life balance. Senior management actually seems to care about you and your family. + The floor that houses SwitchThink is generally pretty quiet with an open floor plan where the majority of employees work. The building has a large central lunch room (used to be a cafeteria, but Desert Financial chose to close the food area because people complained it was "too expensive" and then replaced it with vending machines and restaurants that come sell food twice a week for even more money) with smaller break rooms on each floor. There is a gym that is open to all employees with an area that's used for classes and monthly free massages, as well as a break room called "The Hub" which has ping pong tables, sofas, TVs, an outdoor patio and an Xbox and Playstation, as well as "quiet rooms" for taking personal phone calls.
Cons
- SwitchThink has an identity crisis. The company started out with a heavy aspect on software and have quickly evolved into an IT service company which has kind of reduced the development team to second class citizens. It’s clear that senior management undervalues our work to clients (we’re not charging anywhere near as much as we should!) and holds our server teams to a higher standard, as they keep hiring more people over there to help but the development team keeps taking on more responsibility without getting more resources. - Salaries are significantly under valued. Most of the staff is working for 25-40% less in comparison to what they could make elsewhere. As more experienced staff leaves, it will be very hard to find replacements unless pay is increased to match the market. - Many positions don't have a level system and those that do only go to level 3 (senior). At least on the software team, the majority of developers have 4+ years of service with the company and are already at the senior level, they have no where to move up and small salary increases every year isn't enough incentive to keep them. Management seems blind to this being an issue and even though it's been brought up multiple times in meetings, there's never any action around it. - At least on the software side, it's very hard to find talent. We have had positions go unfilled for over a year with barely any candidates interviewed in that time. Aside from that, the hiring process is generally very slow and we've lost good candidates because making an offer takes so long that people have accepted offers elsewhere in the meantime. - Client work is not very well managed. The project vetting process goes through a sales team that signs off on the team being able to do something usually before anyone technical even says it's possible and/or an unrealistic timeline for completion is given. - Raises come once a year and are based off performance of which the max increase is barely enough to cover cost of living increases. High performers are rewarded with only a 2% increase more than if they met their expected output. - Bonuses are paid out yearly and the amount is communicated well throughout the year. By the end of December, everyone knows the percentage they'll be getting (generally a base of 5% with a max of 7.5%) but it takes until mid-March to be paid out. - Often times when we break the backend, our front end devs can't do any work which causes them to be blocked for large amounts of times because we host the front end and backend on the same servers, in the same solution. - The core product SwitchThink work revolves around, KeyStone, is probably one of the worst applications to work with. Fortunately/unfortunately, there’s only one team that deals directly with it on a day-to-day basis. - Code reviews are all generally done by a single person, which makes learning from them difficult. And while the company has adopted a lot of new tech over the years, those who make technology decisions are also very resistant to change. There are many tools available that could make life easier for developers and reduce a lot of headaches we currently have, but since the people at the top don’t have experience with those technologies or understand them well enough, they are passed over as options. - None of the code is tested. Bringing it up as a concern in meetings is usually opposed because it may take developers longer to do their job. We have an awesome manual QA team that does their best to find any issues, but in the end, they’re mostly just QAing the UI and I feel bad when the responsibility then falls on our front end devs to figure out where the problem actually is. While the tech stack may be on the newer side, deployment and hosting definitely isn't: - Most apps are hosted on local Windows servers that have to be provisioned by another department in order to standup new projects (we do not have DevOps), which more than often takes a very long time to get done. Training was done to understand what's out there for dev team to use on Azure, but it was pretty clear that the current staff needs more specialized training as they've been doing it a certain way for years and changing that will be difficult. - Deployment is done via Bamboo for some applications, but it's not setup as a CI/CD solution and manually logging into servers and deleting/creating folders is still necessary for the most part. Many of the older applications still require you to run the build and copy/paste it onto the server, which is kind of a nightmare. Production deployments end up taking hours instead of a few minutes.
