Pros
Software engineering is still a small enough family that it's up to you how far you want to go. If you show initiative, you're generally allowed to grow and pick up new things. Learning and growth is encouraged from the top. If you're hungry, you can eat pretty well here. There's even a running non-fiction book club that meets once a week with pretty good participation. Everyone seems open to new ideas, there's not a lot of egos getting in the way. It feels like there's good overall direction at the moment. Attitudes are positive, people will take time out of their day to help you out. Software engineering practices are pretty good. There's an emphasis on testing, style, good peer review, automation, and everyone owning the work collectively. The stack is modern without a gross amount of tech debt, but all code is tech debt on some level. As far as engineering horror stories go, there's not a lot here. There's a lot of work to do though, and some corners were cut to get started. If it was perfect, they wouldn't need you. The company is pretty transparent about how things are going, we are updated weekly for the company progress overall. Not a lot of meetings if you aren't in senior management. Individual contributors in software engineering will mostly only have standup, monthly retros, and the occasional one-offs. The rest of the people at the company seem like the nicest people I have ever met. They get people birthday cards and stuff, I'm not really used to that. Thanksgiving had an enormous pot luck lunch where everyone brought something in. It was so much better than some anonymously catered situation. Since everyone put something into it, it had personality. That's kind of how the rest of the culture is. Everyone puts something of theirs in, it's nice.
Cons
It's not a software company, yet. This is an existing business that has been around a long time, with startup aspirations. That's a good thing in some ways, but can be a shock if you're coming from an "engineers first" culture. No coconut water. I don't necessarily consider this a con, but it can be somewhat of a wakeup call to rejoin the real world. It's also fairly frugal, there is not a lot of waste, and let's be honest, wasting money is a lot of fun. Software engineering could be closer to the rest of the company, there's not as much departmental mixing as I'd like. ATL and Charleston need to be closer together and I don't mean geographically