Pros
If you live near Pleasanton, the commute is very good. The $ is somewhat competitive. There are many great people at Blackhawk, and if you are looking to further your domain knowledge about the Payment Card Industry, Blackhawk has much knowledge about it. The top level management seems quite articulate and has a great command of the market and product development, so it's a real shame this doesn't translate to the lower levels. The business model is solid, and the market is expanding - but the devil is in the details...
Cons
I wish I could list more pros than cons... but I can't even come close Mark my review down as the same as the previous "I've been doing software development for 15 years and I've never seen anything remotely close to Blackhawk". Politics exist in all organizations where humans are involved, but Blackhawk seems to be an extreme outlier. At least in Blackhawks's IT department, the culture seems to be based on "consultant culture" where everything is viewed in isolation with a "slash and burn" approach. All nighters and weekends are not uncommon. Organizational: Blackhawk is an *incredibly* politicized environment, at all levels, from top level management all the way down to the engineer level. To survive, it is necessary to determine the political ramifications of almost every decision. Yelling is often the way arguments are won. As a former colleague mentioned in another review "under the bus" culture is so prevalent, it seems unusual when someone *is not* thrown under the bus for making a mistake. To survive, your "under the bus instinct" needs to be razor sharp. Blackhawk is a "work hard" and not a "work smart" environment, in which innovation is stifled in favor of toil. Leadership (oops, I mean "management"): Chaos reigns. There is vision delivered from the top, but it never seems to materialize at the implementation level. Threats are often used as a motivational tool. Technical: Blackhawk's Issuance platform is entirely proprietary and will not help your resume outside of the Blackhawk building. If you interview to work on java for a job on this team, you will not work on java. The proprietary tools that are used do not support any modern development methodologies, so forget about that too. Because of the aforementioned politics, there seems to be fear about changing any of this. If you want to work in non-testable, procedural (and non OOP) environment, then this is the tool for you ;) If you are a non citizen or non green card holder (i.e. if you hold an H1-B that you will need sponsored either by Blackhawk or a contracting agency that will contract you to Blackhawk): Be especially wary - STAY AWAY, FAR AWAY: In many cases, these poor folks seem to be exploited as the "peasant caste", who work the most crazy, thankless hours.
