Pros
East bay location, next to the freeway, good halloween party, leader in gift card space and has only one major competitor who is not as big in gift cards, lot of major banks and big retailers/brands using Blackhawk in the backend like Google, Amazon, Paypal, etc etc, Women CEO, Good office space, Flyers program for employee recognition from peers, Good strong network with all the processors.
Cons
Where do I begin? Let me summarize into 3 categories Talent, Technology and Company culture. Talent - Very few engineers who are smart. Only a handful. Lot of them are just living in a bubble. Below mediocre engineers. Blackhawk 5 years ago before IPO had all these vendors who outsourced contrators and some of them have been converted to full time engineers and there are still some old time contractors left and they are really bad. Current managers are not managing them out and there is a lot of politics for a company like Blackhawk. Focus is not on great engineering talent. It is a financial company with engineering treated as an IT department. These engineers don't leave as they cannot find a job anywhere else. Technology - Blackhawk's business value is strong but the backbone technology is week due to these type of mediocre talent. Some really good people left the company and now it is a combination of bad management + bad engineers who just collect their paycheck. These people have no clue what is a good data structure or algorithms, how do we build truly scalable, resilient systems. They are reactive meaning they get positive cases working and then spend millions fixing scalability issues. The amount of people, time and money spent of the projects can run multiple startups for a year. Current CTO and his team are so distant from reality. They have grand vision but don't know how to execute. Certainly cannot with a team like this. This is not paypal and you need to do something more to attract good talent. Company Culture - HR department is horrible. No support for anything. Some people need to be let go in that department who have been there for years. There is no good partnership and they are always worried about getting sued. People in upper management believe everything middle management says and don't take the time to understand the reality. Bad work culture in engineering due to the above problems, no diversity, no respect for each other among developers. Only very few architects are good. Especially the ones in colorado before were so far from reality that they designed solutions without understanding the business. Not their fault, but management vision is lacking. Below market pay. Managers have to fight to reward some hardworking talented few engineers but never goes through. No investment in training of managers. Also there is a bad messaging that only way to get a promotion is to be a manager when in reality there is dual career path and managers make lesser than principal engineers. This is causing some good engineers to take management career path when they actually make bad managers. Unless things change, this is not a good place to be.