Pros
Strong client list, product is one of the strongest in the market.
Cons
Before the acquisition, the company was decent. The salary and benefits were average, but you have a strong team with good work ethics and trust. After the acquisition, the company has developed serious problems in every aspects: - company culture: its new hiring process is significantly flawed. They pay way below market average salary and hire people based on this assessment test that focuses on aptitude more than experience (the Vista way). As a result, you have all these people that are inexperienced in the roles they fill, and continue to make unprofessional mistakes that simply amaze you. To make things worse, they do not learn from their mistakes and rather more concerned with how to shift blames. People are obsessed with immediate results and ROI, and they do not hesitate to cut corners nor think about potential impacts in the long run. These attitudes were quickly adopted across all levels of the organization and became part of the company cultures. The operating procedures are very rigid and not open to suggestions. They swear by this Vista secret formula that can somehow magically work with every single business model. - executives: some of the most dishonest and shady people I've ever seen. They would tell you one thing and do it in a completely opposite way that leaves you wonder whether it is due to malice or ignorance. Whatever they tell you, it's best to take it with a grain of salt. Several newly hired managers that reported to them shortly left the company within couple months. They refuse to learn about the product and existing processes yet at the same time come up with product roadmap and implement new processes. They let go of people from before the acquisition without learning about their roles and responsibilities or arranged proper transfer of domain knowledge. Within less than one year of the acquisition, they let go of almost every single person from before the acquisition (some left on their own after losing faith in the company). The Los Angeles office is history now. A lot of skills and knowledge are lost in the process, yet they are completely clueless about this. - directors & managers: not the sharpest and not technical savy. Frequently come up with change requests that actually turned out to be existing features in the product. Their methodology in problem solving typically involves reinventing the wheels (poor ones too) because it would take them longer to comprehend what's already implemented. - software engineers: now mainly comprised of "software associates" that are fresh out of college kids, and many of them don't even have a computer science or equivalent degree. The team does not posses the skills to architect or develop significantly new features. Since everyone is at the same level, there is also no one experienced enough to mentor new hires. For a software company, it is very troubling. - QA engineers: now severely understaffed and inexperienced. All of them are new hires where most are fresh out of college kids. Prior to the acquisition, the QA engineers wrote and maintained dozens of tests covering basic and edge cases for each feature. The team also continuously wrote tons of load tests and automation tests scripts. After the new QA manager came on board, the only things left are the most basic dummy tests (and significantly reduced in numbers). New features get easily passed through QA.
