Needs decisions driven by engineering needs, but during my experience, sales was driving everything. Essentially a typical problem of sales/management team trying to constantly add new features, while ignoring the need for major code upgrades that could make adding new features at least 5X faster.
Had some very-skilled staff-level engineers, but most saw the writing on the wall and left after engineering team was cut in half in Dec 2016.
Parent company Choice Hotels is a franchised chain, doesn't understand the need to hire and retain good engineers and happy to downsize engineering (or trade US engineers for Indian contractors) if bottom-line requires it, with the theory being that any new engineer they get off the street is just as good as ones with months or years of experience with their custom software.
Very poor management decisions. Despite repeated suggestions otherwise, sought to write hundreds of Selenium UI tests BEFORE rewriting user-interface (to get off of custom JS + old versions of Struts).
Very stuck in old paradigm of complex & hard-to-change SQL Stored Procedures performing business logic. Software engineers working there had better like SQL, this is unlikely to change and the company is good at scaring away dedicated DBAs.
Promotions seemed to favor age over experience. Fought for years to get minor position promotion without luck, while another older engineer was given same promotion in less than 12 months.
