Pros
Extremely Flexible, perhaps the most flexibility in the industry. Team members are typically good people to work with or at the very least not hostile. Friday after Thanksgiving and a day next to Christmas included in days off. A few food provided events through the year which are great for team building. Your bank of days off roll over from year to year, meaning the use it or lose it policy is based on a cap rather than year end. If you are a self starter, you can expect virtually no oversight. This means you can run things you are assigned to however you want. Your direct manager can offer you small incentives if you work very hard. Folks are very understanding to personal situations you may need to address.
Cons
General Cons: Bentley utilizes a pay structure they call "On-Target Incentive" or OTI which are covered in depth by other Glass Door reviews. What to take from this in particular is 1. If you take a position here, be VERY clear about the breakdown of your salary. Your base pay is what you will receive every two weeks. Your OTI is what you will receive every three months. This amount will be either increased or reduced by a percentage. While I have heard of increases over 100%, my department has always taken large reductions, typically 10% or over. My advice would be to multiply your yearly OTI breakdown by 85% and add it back into total salary to determine what you will truly make here. Lastly, you will hear of the GPS bonus which some recruiters and managers attempt to add to your salary. Be clear that this is not guaranteed, and since 2015 has been paid out at a rate so low, it cannot be counted on. Mine is in the thousands for instance, but I have only seen $300 or less from it. 2. Be CLEAR that OTI is NOT bonus money. This is your money paid at different increments against a percentage. You must also be clear that you do NOT control or contribute to that % in most positions. The official stance is that you contribute 20% to it. Most organizations and folks I've surveyed say they don't even set up yearly goals to meet. 3. You need to be clear that a promotion means more money into the OTI setup before your base pay. That means you may end up accepting more responsibilities while making the same amount of bi-weekly pay, seeing an increase that Bentley owns every three months. 4. One question I was refused a clear answer on was, when I depart, will I see a partial payment of my OTI pay from the first date of the new quarter to my quit date? That means you may walk away from a significant amount of your own money. It is hard to time departures, but just be cognizant of this. You can only accumulate 120 hours of vacation at any given time. This means that in the event you are near your cap, in order to prevent cheating yourself, you must take vacation days at random. You may find that to be difficult depending on how much ownership you take on your work. It's hard to take a vacation day in the middle of a crisis. See below where I describe how that is a likely scenario. Bentley as a whole lacks infrastructure folks who work at other companies may be accustomed to. One piece of advice I wish someone would have mentioned to me before taking the job was that Bentley is NOT a software development company. Executive management does not care about software methodologies, Application Life Cycle Management, project infrastructures, reusable collateral, and anything else that you would come to expect from a mid-size company that delivers software. They do care about selling products before vetting out possibilities, making terrible sales deals that result in losing money but via resourcing and creating less than desirable working environments. Sales and leadership make very poor business deals which result in impossible aims which are typically late in my experience. I have outright heard that we "sell first" then figure out resourcing and execution and was on a meeting where such a thing was done. The advice here is that Bentley is not a software development company. Bentley is a sales company. That means the lack of infrastructure is worked through and even accepted rather than substantiating any sort of internal corporate infrastructure. Job Specific Cons: The lack of infrastructure I mentioned above completely decimates ones ability to provide good work. Items in the ALM framework for instance that other companies may take for granted, like Quality Assurance, are rare or absent from Bentley's methodology. Developers are typically the recipient of difficult work items to complete with minimal requirements that can change after assignment with little ownership either taken or given to individual assignments. "Resolved" cases are typically "tested" manually by a person or people which result in more defects arising from new product features or fixes to broken existing ones. You either take ownership of someone different's failed work or you absorb it. The end result always effects the userbase for the product your working in. Users grow to hate your team pretty quickly, so if you are customer facing like a consultant or project manager, your days consist of apologizing. While the team dynamic is here for most teams, it is meaningless when thrown into the fail and explain life cycle that results here. Like mentioned in other posts or above, career movement is something to be wary of due to the OTI structure. It is also not at all merit based. If you negotiate your career forward or yourself into a different role, you have a better chance to do so with leverage such as an offer letter than with hard work. However, it does not seem to improve your quality of work. Other items folks may also call cons include the constant reorg nature of Bentley. Some staff have had over 5 managers in three years, an uncomfortable amount which makes it hard to build upward relationships. In conclusion, if you combine some the elements of not moving forward, having work you cannot fulfill, and unrewarding work with no possible movement forward, if you accept a position here you are not accepting a career, your accepting a job. If you are joining early in your career, you will not learn crucial basic business skills which predominately would help with communication. If you join later in your career, you will essentially lock yourself into a very hard lifestyle. Note that I mentioned flexibility is a plus, but its often wasted on managing work outside of what most would consider regular business hours.
