A Real Work/Life Balance. Will it last?
Pros
There are many great things: - Modern tech stack. Large parts of the company are using some of the latest tech like Kubernetes, JIRA, git, continuous integration, cloud computing, etc. - Excellent health insurance and benefits. - Good work/life balance. When I started, I worked almost every weekend and very long days. But things settled after about 18 months and I rarely work more than 40 hours/week. - Taking sick and vacation time is taken seriously. There is no expectation to work a little on the side.
Cons
While things are nice there are some downsides: - Turnover of talented developers. A large set of the top developers have left the company over the past year. They are going to really good companies. There have not been new top developers replacing those spots. - Release Engineering and Test is a mess. There's no other way to say it. There's almost a constant state of crisis that has become normal. Hotfixes are a multi-step process that requires a LOT of hand-holding. There's a central testing effort that tries to be a one-size-fits-all solution that fits no one and is very inflexible. Often, test teams will encounter some obscure failure and will file a high-priority defect that gets a lot of attention but often turns out to be a problem with their test environment or something very obscure and not relevant to real customer user cases. - Lack of opportunity those not starting their career at SAS. Promotions are favored for people that have been there for years. There are exceptions, but the discrimination is real. - Growing in India and China. There are lot of new and existing hires from India and China. There have been mixed results with these teams. This also means some meetings at odd hours and major, simple things getting missed due to culture, timezone, etc. - Less vacation than competitors. Most places will give a couple more weeks of vacation than SAS for senior devs. - Diversity over achievement. They required diversity training. They "celebrate" pride. They give a lot of extra attention to women who happen to be good at tech. I guess that's all okay, but the same appreciation and focus is NOT given to individuals that objectively excel at their work. Remember those top developers that left? - Vaccine discrimination? They opened their campus after COVID but only for vaccinated people. I don't think that they ask for proof of vaccination. Pretty much everyone still works from home (which is nice). But there has been talk of "returning to the office soon" for months. If that happens, it may mean masks and such for unvaccinated. Since NC is a purple state, I fear it would cause some political feelings to divide employees. With so many software devs and growing into China/India, why not just go 100% remote?
