Applied Intuition

Strong business strategy in the AV industry.

Great environment as an engineer for gaining experience in customer interactions.

Comp was competitive, skewed toward equity.

It's a shame that the cons outweighed even those very solid pros.

Developer Stress Feature requests from customers can come at any time and get pushed directly onto software developers with almost no notice. Management expects developers to fulfill these sudden and absolute deadlines along with anything else scoped for each 5-week cycle, even if that means (to paraphrase one manager) taking time out of sleep to finish. All engineers additionally have to sit in long customer meetings when bugs or questions arise.

Toxic Culture To fit in as an engineer, you'd better be a white/Asian frat bro in your 20s with no family or other home commitments. Borderline hazing toward new employees when arbitrary procedures are not followed to the tee. Respect is earned and ideas adopted by being the loudest, most argumentative, "scariest" person in the room. Any feedback brought up to higher-ups was not only discounted, but also treated as hostile, discouraging any negative comments. C-Suite made baseless personal accusations about a competitor's leadership in an effort to sway my signing decision; super unprofessional.

Messy Codebase Amazing how a simulation company has software that runs so slowly, with brute-force, memory-intensive procedures now ossified into its architecture. They're just recently starting to care about this because they pass on the costs of execution to their customers. Junior developers get hit the hardest trying to clean up all the code debt that the senior developers introduced in previous years' rush to get a product out.

Start by having empathy for all your employees – not just the ones who look and act like you.