A great environment to work in when you're ready to work
Pros
Advanced software, so constantly learning new things and familiarizing yourself with industry standards and practices. Direct expectations of responsibilities, direct/informative management instruction/feedback. If you don't handle honest criticism well, this may not be the place for you...but if you're the type that actually wants to improve yourself and your knowledge, you will thrive here. Rewarding environment - if you put the work in and show your desire to grow, you will be rewarded here, given more opportunities and responsibilities. On a lighter note, I've been lucky enough to work for a couple companies that had a close "family-feel" in the office, and this is absolutely one of those environments. There are plenty of coworkers in other departments that I've never met or don't remember their name, yet I still feel close with them, like we're working on the same project that we both care about very much and want to see it grow as much as possible. Maybe that's just a private software company thing. At the time of this review, we just celebrated another company holiday party held in a hotel ballroom and it was very classy and extremely fun. Everyone was laughing and dancing and there were loads of door prizes and fake casino gambling for contest prize givaways and lots more. I really look forward to our holiday parties each December, our HR team really puts a ton of work into the event each year. They put in a ton of work normally, for that matter. I'm an engineer and very technical, but for some reason I've always had a difficult time understanding how health/dental/etc insurance works. On more than one occasion, our manager of HR, Tricia Worden has sat me down for more than an hour, and tried so hard to map the entire process out for me, bless her innocent heart. She explains it so well, and I feel so bad 10 minutes later when I forget all of it every time.
Cons
Lazy people need not apply, it won't work out well. This is not an environment where you can phone it in half the week and leave early every Friday to beat traffic. It's not uncommon to see a handful of people working well outside their expected office hours as necessary. We do so because we want to make this company better. If you can't handle working late on an important issue or working from home a few hours on a Saturday a couple times a month, you won't enjoy this environment. Other main topic that I see some potential new employees having issues with is the quickness of change that can happen in a private software company. Growth has been explosive this last year; our Support team has more than doubled in size in just the last year, and our number of customers/clients has increased at an intense rate. For this reason, procedures and organization constantly changes to accommodate. This is not an environment where you sit down and do a consistent order of tasks every day. Understandably, that isn't for everyone. Some people enjoy it, such as myself. The Support issues we deal with day-to-day aren't resolved by "turning it off and back on again"...the people that call us are the admins for the companies that run our software, EM7. Most issues require devotion and diligence to resolve, and sometimes it takes a lot of hard, rewarding work.