Development Manager - Great place to work, Great Values, Typical challenges of a maturing company
Pros
Great office environment and facilities. Great culture and values. Good career growth opportunities if you are in the right area -- especially early on. Great place to start a career in professional software development. Self motivated individuals are highly rewarded. Lots of energy in some product areas. Steady/level-headed CEO. Lots of respect for bottom-up idea generation.
Cons
Aging customer base that pays most of the company's bills. As a result, upper management is very risk-averse and does not make bold moves that anticipate market changes or move the market in any meaningful way. Company is often playing catch-up. Company spends too much time giving an aging (albeit large) set of customers the exact thing that they ask for rather than what they really need. Different product areas sometimes seem to compete unnecessarily. The org-structure is too rigid and centered around particular products and roles rather than immediate business needs. This makes software development across multiple products unnecessarily challenging. Supporting roles, such as quality engineering, also belong to entirely different orgs with different sets of priorities which quite often do not align with the actual needs of a product at a particular point in its life-cycle. Middle/Upper management tends to intermittently micromanage product development. Career growth can plateau in some areas of the company leaving good people with no choice but to leave or face stagnation.