Pros
There are two sides of the house: contract employment, and S&T (aka in-house R&D). I work in the latter group. - The folks here meet or beat the Joel test, as far as that means anything, in research and development which is not the same thing as conventional software development. Great tools, great working conditions, great team. - We are about moving from 0 to 1, so we have to make things that didn't exist, and we have to make them good enough to be useful. I'm more of a 0->1 guy and not so much of a 1->10 guy, so its a good fit. - I get to work with very intelligent, capable, and decent people. They aren't psycho narcissists, and they are very brilliant. The conversations are something from the CalSci staff in Numb3rs, fabulous.
Cons
The old office was a lot smaller and they had to make about half the space into hot-desks. Now they have enough room, and that is very good. The covid lockdowns drove a lot of our working to be from home, remote. The teams are now remote, and so the same team can have folks from all the time-zones. It is cool, but took some time to get used to it. The "back to office" transition is taking its own time, and that is good as well as challenging: it took years to get here, so getting to the new normal isn't overnight. The customer is particular about what they think they want, so there are formalized ways you have to go about showing them new things.
