A Great Place to Start and Stay
Pros
* Good Salary and benefits * Everyone I met was great to work with * The work feels important * The CEO is great and it feels like the company really tries to do things "the right way". * There's a cafeteria right inside the building (for Lakeside and Apple Hill campuses)
Cons
If you want to be a developer, note that ASEs do development work only about half of the time with a team of their choosing, more or less. You do technical support during the other half (taking phone calls with customers, answering emails, and troubleshooting issues). However, there is an expectation that you will transfer to another team within about a year, whether that's a development team, sales, application engineering, education/training, or whatnot. Transferring out can take longer if you don't mesh well with the teams you work with or if the team you want to work with has few/no open positions. A whole bunch of ASEs were let go all around the same time as I was. We all had a similar experience; we were given a "performance improvement plan" and if we did not meet the improvement goals after 2 weeks, we could either try one more time for another 2 weeks or take a severance package. I heard that *nobody* passed the performance improvement plan. In retrospect, it seems that it was really a layoff but they just didn't want to call it a layoff for some reason. I wish they were more upfront about it. I consider this the one black mark in an otherwise great experience I had at the company.