Pros
As a Sweetwater customer, I knew their support to be legendary. I never felt like a dollar sign to them. I always felt like I actually mattered. Now, as Sweetwater employee, I’m happy to say I feel just as supported and valued as when I was as a customer. There are a bunch of perks — on-site gym, salon, physician… But they’re not gimmicks. They’re all here because someone had a need and Sweetwater took the time to hear it, plan it, and then support it right. If I need anything to do my job, I have faith there’s someone to talk to and they’ll support me. And I’m expected to provide that same level of support and respect to *my* customers — be they inside or outside the company. The culture of “support your customer” and “do the right thing by them” pervades every aspect of the company. This makes for an incredibly fulfilling job experience. There’s a ton of work, yes. But I can trace it all to positive effects it has on the people who rely on me, and that’s a great feeling to have at the end of the day. And maybe it’s just a few thousand people all in the same place all united in the same mission. Or maybe it’s just what you get when everyone feels supported and heard? But everyone is super friendly. I’ve worked a lot of places where I had to hide my “midwest nice” fit in or climb the corporate ladder. Here it’d be weird if I didn’t let it shine. On the tech side, the company’s focus on continual improvement and adaptability makes it a surprisingly agile environment considering its size and lineage. Work is done in sprints, the stake holders are always reachable for questions, and death spirals aren’t really a thing. There’s a good balance between working with legacy code (though see “tech debt”, below) and experimenting with breaking technologies like LLMs and AI.
Cons
Let’s be honest; it’s not curing cancer. It can sometimes feel like I’m not doing enough in my job to meet the myriad challenges we all face every day. But I can absolutely say there is more music in the world because of Sweetwater and my role in its mission. Like, provably more. And that’s its own kind of big deal. On the technical side of things, a developer looking to join Sweetwater should know that the infrastructure is built upon decades of bespoke code that does exactly what was needed at the time. If you hear that and think “that sounds like a lot of tech debt,” you are correct. Maintaining and refactoring legacy systems is as least as much a part of the job as delivering new features. There are people for whom keeping a big, gyrating, beloved machine humming is fulfilling. And there are others that hear that and think “not for me”. The “not for me” folks should at least ask a lot of questions before signing up.