I'm contacted about a position with FreedomPay. They (and everyone else) go on and on about the office. I can't overstate how weird it is for a company to market it's office as hard as FreedomPay does. "The office is so nice." "We have a great new office" -- It's an office. It has cubicles. You over look the highway. There is nothing about this place that 50 other companies in a one mile radius don't have in spades. The kicker is, they didn't get enough space. So, you see a cramped space where people are doubling up in offices. They're moving programmers to another office that is in the midst of being built/renovated. It's missing things like outlets, toilets, heat, but nothing important. The phat office is a bate and switch for the CIA-black-site they move you to, which is more like an unfinished construction space. No free cafe if you're in the "other office".
The technology product team at FreedomPay is lead by a bunch of middle aged white guys. Literally, all the executives in technology are middle aged white men. If you're gay, brown, or a woman, FreedomPay tech will be a tough place for you. How unpleasant? Unpleasant enough that every female technology leader (through the executive ranks) has left in the last three months, and they were all top performers.
That lack of diversity directly translates to their software. The guys running the development area hit their prime in the early 2000's when big relational databases running on big servers was cool. It's not now. We've picked up a thing or two in the last ten years, and FreedomPay does not employ any of them..... at all. Technology innovation at FreedomPay measured by third party integrations and not unique and clever solutions to daunting problems. As stated in their job descriptions, FreedomPay is a Microsoft shop: Windows, Visual Studio, C#, SQL Server, and Reporting Services. The cool dev stuff sold in interviews is NO WHERE (NO. WHERE.) as prevalent as sold in interviews. I cannot understate this. The worst part of this is the poor management means constant firefighting, weekend work, and everyone fried all the time. The few good people in tech get burned out and split.
