Pros
Fun events like happy hours and release parties. The people are generally OK.
Cons
Pay is awfully low - the company refuses to pay its employees a competitive wage. We are hemorrhaging employees in R&D because of this reason. Hyland tries to sell itself on its "awesome benefits" - you will use maybe a few, if any of the benefits they mention besides the obvious, and most workplaces that aren't 6 people or so (and even some that are) offer them. They also say that there's "a great work-life balance" - you will be overworked if you have a number greater than 2 in your title; one of our yearly goals is even to "increase rigor AND pace" - emphasis theirs, not mine. Also, the diner food isn't great; and while I won't hold that against the company, I will hold it against the company that it's so expensive (it's also billed post-tax, so it's an even bigger hit to your pay). $7 per pound, and sauces and such are included in that pound. But the diner is the least of any worries. If you have a number in your title that is not 4, 5, or 6 - at least in development - you make no decisions and you are a code monkey. Everything is spelled out very precisely, no details are left up to the developer implementing anything. Career paths are a joke. It's (effectively) linear, it takes too long to move up, and it effectively stops you from moving after you become a developer 3. From developer 3, you have two options: the first is the management track, which is where it ends because there are a million people in front of you in line for manager, senior manager, director, etc. positions (and nobody in them is leaving any time soon because they're actually paid well). The second is the "standards track," where you become a developer 4, 5, and 6. You make standards and decisions on what developers 1-3 will do, but generally don't touch code. Developers 4-6 are also limited in quantity like managers (only one dev 4 per team, only a few dev 5s per "program", and one dev 6 or two wherever they feel like putting a good buddy of the vp). Senior management is one *impressive* joke. The executive vice president of product, Brenda Kirk, told everyone in development/qa that she started out in some low-paying position 20 years ago when the company was 15 people, and now she's an EVP. She proceeded to say - explicitly, not implied - that anyone can do that, and that every employee can forge their own path. That's *not* how that works. Speaking of Brenda Kirk, she also implies at every monthly department meeting that money isn't important, knows that everyone complains about compensation, dodges the question every time, and everyone gets mad (while I agree that money isn't everything, Hyland pays up to 35% below market average for a developer depending on how long you've been in the field). A few months ago she promised to publish every job's average salary (and not median, because that would make sense), only to come out this month to say say that wasn't happening anymore. Not that anyone *really* cared, because that wasn't going to fix the compensation issue anyways - we care about our pay going up and meeting the market average, not to match our coworkers who have huge variations in qualifications compared to each other. This company's only saving grace from senior management is Bill Priemer (the CEO), the guy who still loves to sit down and talk with the grunts under him and will remember something you tell him a month later, and it makes it almost personal. HR generally tries to screw you over at any chance they get (whether intentional or not), or treats new employees as second-class citizens for no reason; it is effectively impossible to get them to do anything unless your manager joins in the conversation. If your manager doesn't like you, you might as well just quit. We have so many levels of "upper" management that I'm not even really sure what most of the levels even *do* anymore. I'm convinced that the "huge" reorganization we just went through was effectively a way to get more peoples' friends in higher places, just as it's always been, where incompetent people lead (see Brenda Kirk rant above, but she's not the only example). We also hired on a pretty sizable chunk of developers from India, because it's cheaper. More money for the VPs' (that apostrophe is in the correct spot) friends' salaries, really. Oh yeah, did I mention we bought a competitor whose software is significantly better than ours because we didn't want competition? Because that's a thing that happened. We also proceeded to lay off a bunch of the developers from that company, while proceeding to hire more developers anyways. Anyone I've talked to from that acquisition says they're paid more than everyone else at Hyland, so it's probably just to control costs. Which makes it even worse. Yeah, maybe don't work here.
