Pros
There aren't many pros to working at GAINSystems but what pros there are exist because of some of the people you work with. In my time at GAINSystems there was a lot of comradery between the low-level employees. We did our best to support one another to make our jobs less cumbersome. There was never any level of trying to step on someone else to advance a career that I saw. GAINSystems is a very small company, which, being involved in the software side, means you have to have a lot of different responsibilities. If you can thrive in that sort of environment it means that you get a lot of exposure to various elements and get good at pivoting what your focus is frequently.
Cons
While the low-level employees work well together and have one another's back, that is definitely not how management works. This is a family owned/run company and it shows. The management that existed when I worked there, and likely will exist into the future, is the result of people leaving and others being promoted from within that were not qualified for the position. This has resulted in an unfocused direction for the company. The salary for the software engineers is/was at least 30% below median for Chicago. This was confirmed with other people who worked there. The CEO of GAINSystems is uncompromising and does not listen to reason. He likes to micromanage all departments regardless of his level of understanding of what actually is going on in said department. Everything done at GAINSystems is reactionary. I can't count the number of times that some catastrophe could have been prevented had people been given time before hand to think through and prepare and harden the software. It was constantly some VP or the CEO promising something that we didn't actually have and then the developers/analysts scrambling to fulfill their promises for them. The software is using outdated concepts and libraries and because of the reactionary tendencies mentioned above has band-aid code on top of band-aid code to try to get something out the door.
