Pros
I first want to start off by saying I waited 6+ months after I left to write this review to remove emotion, and to make this as objective as possible. The people at PS are by far the best part about it. I worked with every team throughout my time at PS and worked with a lot of smart, fun, and enthusiastic people that made every day worth coming in. The team of developers that was amassed during my time at PS was the best team of developers I had worked with at that point. Everyone was smart, independent, and extremely fun. We built a lot of good tech and besides some problems outline below, we had many very solid systems. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I spent almost 5 years here and really enjoyed everything up until the last 1 or 1.5 years. It started out as a small company feel but even though assurance from Eric and other managers that it would stay that way, it inevitably lost it after multiple acquisitions and dilution. At one time it was a small, agile place to work where the tech team had some say in what would get worked on. We had a say in due dates and how things would get done to make sure they were done right. It was fun to work there as the perks were based around younger people. Free healthcare option, happy hours at the end of every month, lunch delivery every friday, scooters hoverboards foosball etc for our break time. It was an absolute blast coupled with the fact that we had hired 8 or so extremely bright developers and we were creating some new stuff for the first time in over a year or so. This was probably 2.5 years into my employment with PaySimple. We had a ton of promise and the tech team was finally gaining clout with the rest of the business. I really thought we were headed towards becoming a real tech company to compete with the businesses that were our competitors like Square and Braintree. (Now here where it all fell apart starts in the Cons section.)
Cons
The difference is that those companies value technology and the tech team is what drives the success of the company. It was 2015 not 2003, technology is what sells to customers now and management was and still is very behind the times and run the company as such. So just when I think we are going to accelerate the exact opposite happens. The CTO told me we were holding all expenses until after the next acquisition (which had happened once or twice already at this point) which was supposed to be happening soon. 8+ months later we are still in the same pattern with plenty of work, TONS AND TONS of bugs (up to 950+ when I left), tons of technical debt, no load testing, and very little technical progress. We had a few of our good developers leave and we replace them and lose people again because they are realizing the direction we were going. CTO drops on us that we are no longer hiring in Denver and we are opening an office in India for new developers. He said it was an "experiment" and we could drop it at any time. It was not an experiment at all and he hired a developer there already without ever having a developer interview them or having ANY way or plan for them to work with us. Now that we were owned by a private equity we then started to buy companies that were slightly related to our lines of business. Never was a tech due diligence done by anyone but the CTO who is not very technical at all. So the first few that came in were absolute technical disasters. This coupled with the fact that we were started to be given projects with due dates ALREADY decided, without anyone ever talking to the tech team or having a spec at all. We had quarters worth of our work planned ahead without a single spec or idea what was contained in that work. At this point I realized that the CTO had been lying to us for much longer than I had thought. I made it clear to him and many managers how I felt, this was never a secret. In my 1:1s, my coaching sessions, my quarterly written questionnaires, and my yearly review I made it absolutely clear how I and others felt on the team. We continued to push on the same path and that is when I realized it was time to move on. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TL;DR -The people are the best quality of PS -Shares are worthless from acquisition and dilution -Marketing and Sales run the whole show -Average benefits and no loyalty (in my 1st year at a new company I have many more days off and benefits than I did after 4.5 years at PS) -Tech is just the work horse and we get very little say in anything -A lot of technical debt and near 1000 bugs with no plan to address either -CTO is not honest and only cares about those above him not his team members -Certain people do nothing all day and nothing is done about it Don't get me wrong, if you are in Marketing, Sales, or just starting your career this is a great place to work. If you want to work for a technology company and focus on tech stuff or above 30, this is not where you want to work.