Pros
I actually learned a lot during my time at Smith. I was able to get exposure to new technologies and kind of general corporate culture that I didn’t have in my previous roles. The people I worked with were very smart and nice for the most part.
Cons
HR is actually insane. From the get go - telling me that having my cat in view of the camera during a meeting is distracting to being an overall nightmare when it came to planning and follow through for FMLA leave an benefits… I just had an icky and unpleasant experience dealing with them. Seconded to all the items in another review “systematically toxic” by an anonymous engineer. Management in general is very focused on not only meeting arbitrary deadlines but assigning responsibility to subordinates and then assigning blame to those subordinates when something goes wrong. So the culture is basically rushing to meet a deadline that is unclear why it’s set - often running into systemic obstacles outside of your control - trying to meet deadline anyway because of the culture - and then getting blamed (often publicly ) when it fails. The benefits. Vacation: Technically there is unlimited PTO but I found that in my tenure I took very little vacation because of pressure for deadlines and frankly lack of management taking any time off. People were online allll the time. At night, on weekends, while in the hospital after their wife gave birth… you name it. So- you can imagine feeling unable to log off also. No 401k match