Pros
Everyone I work with has been great, I’ve had a ton of opportunities for mentorship. I was given a lot of freedom/trust to take on challenging projects early on which helped me build my career. And I’ve gotten a lot of encouragement and opportunity to grow my cyber security skills which does not completely align with my day to day work but has always been an interest of mine—which was a really nice unexpected bonus of this role. We also get access to industry leading coding tools like claude code (with a ton of tokens!), all the major IDEs (pro versions obviously), copilot, pretty much anything you could want. I’ve been promoted multiple times in recognition of my efforts and I feel very valued here. I started as a part of the EDP program and I would not hesitate to recommend that path to anyone considering it. I received a ton of great training as a part of that and I have been able to build my career even faster than I would have imagined. And I’ve had some fun along the way too. Can’t stress enough how great my whole circle has been to me.
Cons
Pretty much everything I have to say here will pertain to the St. paul office, starting with the time zone: being a hybrid organization, we often operate on Hartford time (or offshore time) which means 7:30am, sometimes 7am meetings. So with the in-office requirement, there are a lot of very early mornings—especially if you don’t live in St. Paul. And these mornings are made even earlier by the parking situation. Yes, there is a lot next to the building and an underground parking ramp that you can pay for—but the waitlist for those options is in the hundreds. I have been on the waitlist for over a year and I think I’m actually further back than when I started because it’s based on seniority and some of the more tenured folks really want their parking back now that we’re in office 3 days a week. So I, like many others, park in a ramp about 10 minutes away. The office is not in a particularly safe part of the city and I have definitely had some scary interactions on that walk. Especially during the winter when, again because of Hartford time, I’m showing up before the sun is even close to coming up. As of recently they have started offering a shuttle but I haven’t heard of anyone using that just yet. But I’m also not a morning person. If getting up early doesn’t bother you, you’ll probably have very little to complain about :)