Fanatics

The company is growing, bigly.

Great compensation, some of the best in Jacksonville, FL, and other locations I have been told.

It feels like a functioning meritocracy, which is super rare. Notice I say functioning and not "claimed," because I have seen it in action directly and indirectly.

Good, individualized feedback from your direct supervisor. Lots of 1-on-1s to give and receive complaints. You are given the opportunity to change when there is a problem, grow when it's necessary, or just be told you are crushing it.

The work is usually fun, exciting, and often times cutting-edge. You feel like you make a difference, whatever it is you are working on.

Lots of good, modern benefits, DTO being the best. Real and usable DTO. Options to work remote are always available, but you are encouraged to work in the office for collaborative reasons. Everything seems to be at the discretion of your manager, though, so some managers don't have any issue with remote work, but the position itself will rarely be considered full-time remote.

We have potential for an annual purge every year. Whether this is good or bad, it affects a company's reputation and makes local hiring more difficult. A potential hire will always think twice knowing that they could be laid off in a year.

Those familiar with cutting-edge tech know that it can be a pain in the butt to utilize. The company needs more tech cohesion and less tribal knowledge. This unfortunately means that West Coast Fanatics will need to relinquish a little tech direction control, i.e., let other facets take charge of some frameworks or things, or co-develop.

That advice, I feel, sounds solid, but therein lies the problem. There is a disparity in treatment between the West Coast and Other / East Coast. Make no mistake, the high-tech praise spotlight is spent 68% (or whatever percent it is) of the time on San Mateo. Simply put, it is just not equal to its shine on the other branches. However, it really isn't the end of the world. There are incredibly capable people on the West Coast; it just feels sometimes that they forget the East Coast is just as capable. In a sense, you feel like the B-Team to their A-Team.

All that being said, the company's motto right now is "One Fanatics," so they are responding to feedback and criticisms internally, which in itself feels good. Most companies probably would not care, right?

It's hard to give advice; the company is being really well managed from my corner cubicle. Everything is looking positive – even my current cons are trending upwards.

I think maybe we are too cutting edge at times, especially with fancy cloud operations. The most important thing for a tool is that the tool is working solidly. We (at times) have it backward, where we add every feature under the sun, and it works some of the time.

No one wants to really say it aloud, but this is what "fail fast + adjust" gives you. This is a feature of that system: tons of features that work for 80% of the intended users.

What nobody admits to their boss or whichever tech director is that the remaining 20% requires a brand new service, brand new system, or a total rewrite. In my opinion, that defeats the whole purpose of it. Taking a little more time and polishing up designs and implementations upfront saves time in the long run. But that's just my humble opinion...