Pros
Developers get to spend a fairly large percentage of their time doing development and related tasks. Meetings are minimal if you’re in IT and not a manager. I probably averaged 1-2 meetings a week. Day-to-day life as a developer is pretty good. Management seems to understand that technology is a key part of the business, and IT is treated well. I experienced little pressure to meet deadlines; when something changed, we either removed some functionality or pushed the deadline back. Developers do not have on call responsibilities. The Network Operations Center takes care of operational issues and they are the ones who get paged. Occasionally I had to stay up until around midnight for a major deploy my team was involved in, but you can do this from home. IT management cares about code quality, in particular the codebase for the main website. They also care about keeping somewhat up-to-date on current technologies. Developers and testers can join once-a-week lunchtime reading groups about technology subjects that may or may not be directly related to their everyday jobs. Most people are smart and reasonably good at what they do. Nice location near the Wasatch mountains and very close to I-215. Work/life balance was great. I rarely had to put in any extra time, and when I did I could come in late the next day. Some departments, especially IT, have flexible schedules.
Cons
Upper management seems to have taken a real dive lately. Some of their decisions leave lower-level employees scratching their heads. The most recent example is the “O.co” rebranding. A majority of customers, after seeing a commercial about the new O.co name, tried to go to “o.com” instead of “o.co”. Any person at my level could have told management this would happen, if they had bothered to ask. Lack of confidence in executives has led to a general feeling of instability, culminating in the laying off of about 50 people, most in IT, just last week. The Provo development office was also closed after being open only about a year, and people who were hired expecting to work most of the time out of Provo are now stuck with a long commute. Financial results have been disappointing the last few quarters. As part of the financial rebalancing that happened at the beginning of the year, most of the employee perks were cut: parking shuttle, holiday party, and conference budget. Work areas are pretty crowded, and many people don’t have cubicles. Life is not very good for some development leads. Instead of being a technical leadership position, dev leads really end up spending most of their time managing people, coordinating projects, and going to meetings. For those that would like to stay technical and still spend time every day writing code, this is frustrating.
