Pros
The hiring process was fair and unbiased and I felt that the take-home test gave me the opportunity to show my best abilities. I was able to work on some fun and interesting projects in a friendly, welcoming environment with space to learn, experiment, and take pride in my accomplishments. Management often praised my work. I worked with very intelligent co-workers who enjoyed receiving and giving mentorship on programming, product, and design. A talented product team who provide the developers with thoughtful design specs, making the dev team's product goals clear. Little to no egotism or politics. foreUP retains their employees when they become sick or need extended leave for family reasons. There was a story I remember of an employee who had a serious illness that kept him from working for several months, and if I remember the story correctly, foreUP gave him unlimited PTO through the crisis until he was eventually able to return to work. I noticed that more than one or two employees who had left the company were welcomed back later. Flexibility with vacations and a great work/life balance. Team outings, company parties, golf tournaments. foreUP gives back to their community through service projects. Signs of growth and improvement in many areas. Free snacks and the occasional free lunch.
Cons
The CEO was replaced and the reasons weren't fully explained. The pay wasn't as competitive as I would have preferred. Some of the most skilled employees, both in tech and sales, would leave for better pay elsewhere. In tech, there were no employee incentive programs such as bonuses or stock options (although perhaps this may have changed or could change in the future). Some of the code was difficult to work with and there wasn't as much of a commitment to clean, quality code as I would have liked. I had to push hard for it, and felt like new features were given more importance than the reliability of the product. Because the product could be somewhat brittle and code coverage wasn't as high as it could have been, all pull requests had to be funneled through the CTO. While I was there, there was no front-end unit testing, although it was being worked on. For some time, the company did not provide employees with computers, who would often need to bring their own. With some pressure, this policy slowly changed.