Life behind the giant glass coffee cup
Pros
Kinaxis hires good people. My coworkers are some of my favourite people. The atmosphere is generally cooperative and people are supportive of each other. My immediate supervisor is very nice and has great people skills. Pay and benefits are better than I expected, and employees are automatically given raises every year, based in part on performance. We're encouraged to get training to improve our job skills and get where we want to be with our careers. Everyone has a training budget. It's been mostly up to me to figure out what kind of training I want. I am generally not asked to work outside of normal office hours, which is nice. Nobody calls me at home or bugs me about work when I'm on vacation. (My job isn't one where one would expect to work odd hours or crazy overtime.) Although I am expected to work in the office most of the time, I also have the option of working from home some days. For example, I might stay home to wait for a repair person, without taking vacation or pretending to be sick. Everyone wins. I'm still working here in 10 years, I'll consider that a good thing.
Cons
There has been a lot of restructuring and shifting of plans. The company is growing quickly, so some adjustment is unavoidable. New people come in, bringing new ideas. The trouble is that continual upheaval is stressful. It creates overhead, because I have to keep track of who's responsible for what now and which procedures have changed, while at the same time getting actual work done. I kept thinking things would settle down in a month or two, but it's been like this for a couple of years, so maybe this is the new normal. On a related note, although the company as a whole seems to be doing well and growing, recent restructuring has led to the unexpected layoff of several employees who, to the best of my knowledge, were competent and well liked. It's disconcerting.
