Pros
1. There were/are some quite intelligent people who worked there (inexplicably). 2. The office in Wicker Park (a trendy Chicago neighborhood) is in close proximity to many restaurants, coffee shops, and bars—the latter of which will become a prominent fixture in your life at GAINSystems. 3. Work/life balance is good if you’re on the technical side. You generally won’t be called at midnight to put out fires.
Cons
1. The company is case study on how NOT to do DevOps. Modern build systems (Gradle, Maven) for dependency management are non-existent. Artifacts/jars are actually checked into version control, making common VCS operations a hilariously slow process. 2. SDLC and release management best practices are not used. Numerous legacy versions of the software are actively maintained and merged together because senior management is afraid of forcing clients to upgrade. Releases cause enormous headaches for engineers/release managers. There is no such thing a smooth release at GAINSystems. 3. Software regressions are frequently introduced. Stringent QA and testing are not valued. Forget BDD/TDD, I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a unit test at this company. 4. There is no sprint/project planning or formal requirements-gathering phase to any initiative. Developers are given vague, nebulous tasks without any codified functional specification from the business teams. This company has never heard of functional acceptance criteria (or proper SDLC in general). 5. Tech stack is antiquated. Who still uses a thick Java Swing client in 2016? But allocating resources to re-architect the entire monolith would involve a commitment to engineering that this company has never or will never have. 6. No room for growth. A company of like 40 people can only have so many vice presidents. 7. Compensation and benefits are effectively a joke. Business analysts out of college can expect around market rate—however, everyone on tech side is paid 30-50% below market without question. Some of the salaries initially offered to engineers were bordering on the territory of insulting. Benefits are below average. Expensive healthcare premiums, almost non-existent 401K match, and the thought of a cash bonus or equity is laughable. 8. All moves are incredibly reactive. Decent raises are only hastily offered to others when a key employee gives notice, never unsolicited. There is no long-term vision, either for the software, or building human capital.
