Best career experience - Executive PlateSpin Employee Review

Initial startup environment was great - everybody helped with everything. There were no company secrets in the beginning - management shared everything which made everybody feel like they 'owned' what they were doing. The early development/test team was terrific - great talent, great knowledge, higfh quality effort - and market leading products!! In the beginning only the best developers were hired. Great small company perks! Coffeee, snacks, Friday lunches, staff social evernts!!

As PlateSpin grew it assumed a more 'corporate' environment. Executive managment became 'removed' from day-to-day eforts of staff. "Getting the product out the door' became more important than getting a GOOD product out the door. Also, it started to seem that hiring any developer was preferable to hiring the best developers. Once company began geting lots of venture funding it seemed that executive management started to keep secrets abouit things that it had freely shared before.

The best reason to work at PlateSpin would be for the opportunity to deal with some of the latest technologies in the industry, and the opportunity to make your opinion count. Even as an intern, the feedback I provided on a project was considered and acted upon.

The release cycles are so fast, and the fundamentals of the product change so many times, you don't really get the opportunity to build a good framework to automate the testing. Manual testing does provide a user's touch, but should the product scale up in size, it would take far too much manpower to do end to end manual testing.