Pros
iContact is a decent place to grow as a young professional in the tech community. You will learn a lot of valuable skills, regardless of your department, and you will work with many dedicated individuals that care about the work they do and the industry they're in. Not every employee is an "A player" but most are. - A strong work/life balance is promoted heavily, and it's true for most if not nearly all positions in the company. - Your standard checklist of "startup" amenities is there for you too -- ping pong, foosball, happy hours with beer/wine, and more. - For the most part, the company does a good job of hiring, with bad apples rarely finding their way into a job. - Compensation is fair for the area, but just fair. If you want to be at the top of the pay scale for your position, iContact isn't for you. - Health benefits (medical, dental, vision) are great and the company contributes to your 401K. - The iContact product itself is good and most customers seem to really like it, but it's a little behind the times compared to competitors. And the other two products the company has don't seem to get much attention because there aren't as many users. - There's a gym with a couple of showers, so that's convenient if you're into that. But it's usually occupied by a bunch of grunting employees that yell through workouts and sweat everywhere. Gross. - Free coffee and soda and iced tea. - The CEO seems like a genuinely nice guy, but he doesn't really get in front of the company all that much. I honestly have no clue if he knows the business the best in the company or if he's just someone people give information to. Giving him more facetime to the employees would probably be good so they get to know him better.
Cons
The more responsibility people in the company have, the more their work quality diminishes, to the point where those who are managing others simply spend most of their time managing and not a lot of time contributing. And those who are managing the managers, the "leadership team," they're basically just in meetings all day, rarely providing any sort of motivation or direction to their teams. They leave that to their managers and spend most of their time in their offices with the door closed. There is very little communication from the top. There used to be quarterly meetings for the whole company, but they stopped them. Things like priorities and values seem to change from quarter to quarter or year to year and there doesn't seem to be much reason for it, so you're not really sure who's driving it, which can be frustrating when you're not in the position to make decisions that affect the company's growth. This is by far the company's biggest weakness and the main reason why it will never likely be the kind of company that gets big again. It's likely to stay in the same position it is until it gets sold off to another company or goes out of business. There's just not a lot of urgency coming from leadership to make the company a better one. Lots of talk but no action whatsoever. As far as the office goes, it's not exactly nice. Feels really small and depressing and outdated. There were whispers about looking for a new space before I left, but I don't know if those ever materialized. There's also not a lot of fairness in technology. Some people have brand new Macbooks, some have decent Dell laptops, and others are stuck with these huge paperweights that are five years old or more. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. So if that matters to you, you might get disappointed. Or you might not. The product itself doesn't get updated as much as it should, and that makes it hard to retain customers and get new ones. Lots of team members say they feel overworked, but then you seem them playing ping pong or exercising in the gym, so who knows? They make you pay for snacks from vending machines. A lot of friends tell me their RTP offices have free snacks, so that's kind of lame. They do have free fruit, but it runs out pretty quickly and takes forever to get refilled.
