"THE PLACE" to learn how to develop a world class enterprise product
Pros
The company has two major divisions the Product Development handled by Engineering and Product Customization handled by Professional Services. I work with the Product Engineering Team Development Division at Bangalore Office, We are the world leader in Product Information Management behind the big boys IBM, Oracle and SAP. I would say its a gift that a .NET Product Development Company exists in India as opposed to the tons of other so called product companies who just give an already developed product from the US to be maintained in India or developed on the Open source stack due to cost issues. This product has Master data features which are 5 years ahead of what MS SQL Server has and we are competing against the big boys so a startup mentality is required but with the right processes and quality of delivery is also need since there are many customers who are already on the previous versions. This is definitely not a 9-5 company. The pay and travel is related to how well one contributes to the product and performance is very well rewarded. The depth of technology and the challenges you learn are tremendous. Its not the same work for many hours its different features, challenges and technologies that make you work smarter and harder. Unlike other companies the Product development guy is also expected to understand the business which at first it hard for a techie but eventually they understand that its business that drives technology in application development. This is also a stepping stone for those who are looking to start their own product companies as every aspect of how to develop a product is open for everyone. The only company I have seen who have more than 7 architects for a single product. There is a saying at Riversand "if you work 1 year at Riversand its equivalent to 3 years of experience" You would blow your competition when you go in for an Interview just by the sheer depth of the technologies that you have used. Here we just don't use the Frameworks we also write our own Frameworks which the Frameworks catch up eventually.
Cons
The new comers who are not self starters struggle initially with some end up quitting the same. The entire source code is given to you to figure it out and those who are comfortable with more than 10 lacs lines of code start the debugger and figure out the codes that they are supposed to work. This could have been better handled if there are some training to hand hold these guys to stop the initial frustration. To be fair the product is more than 10 years old and even training would not do justice, one has to have the patience to take it one day at a time to eventually understand the whole of the product which should take anywhere from 2 - 4 years. The other one is mentorship programs along with rotation policy to rotate the teams across different modules of the product.
