Start up culture that needs more experts - Engineer Stone Cobra Employee Review

1.0
12 Mar 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Coworkers are great. They make it a fun place to come in and work. Interesting projects with challenging and constantly varied tasks. You get to wear a lot of hats and the fast-paced environment will really put you to the test. It's great if you like to dig in and get your hands dirty and learn. This is a company where you will need to figure things out on your own, you won't have your hands held so it's a good place if you enjoy a challenging environment without a lot of structure. The company tries to keep a start up culture with ping-pong, beer kegs, Fireball Fridays (yes, you too can do shots in the office!) and quarterly awards parties.

Cons

You are expected to be up to speed in unreasonable amounts of time on products that take a long time to master. You will often be put in front of customers as experts when you are new, this can be really difficult if you are a person who isn't good at being dishonest or like being on the spot. There will be very little leadership or guidance. If you are a developer you will need to split your time among many projects. The split time is not done in a way that actually contributes to the overall completion or success of the project but simply to sum up total hours so management can report that all employees are billable and that all projects have staffed hours even if tasks cannot be accomplished in those hours. I found it difficult to work with a management team who had never worked in software development. Your manager will not be technical, she will not understand the technical problems you are attempting to solve and it creates a lot of unneeded chaos for working across multiple projects. Additionally, there is a lot of very dishonest business practices that staff is asked to partake in. This made the work environment very uncomfortable to stay in long term and makes it hard to feel like you are giving customers a good and valuable experience.

Explore other reviews about Stone Cobra

5.0
18 Sept 2021
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I switched companies at the wrong time. They would have been fantastic to work with during the pandemic.

Cons

They did not have an office near me, otherwise I would have never left.

5.0
24 Mar 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Stone Cobra is one of those places that you wake up and want to come to work every day. The people are amazing, some of the most intelligent in the industry, and one of the most collaborative organizations I have ever crossed paths with. From providing new equipment, to working on bleeding edge technology, to providing an environment conducing to learning new technologies and even toying with new applications, it is overall a great organization. The people at Stone Cobra are just that, people. You are of course a metric, as with any business, how productive are you? How much value add are you providing to the organization? But the managers and the project managers genuinely care about the well being of the employee. One example is providing unlimited PTO and snacks in the office. Some people are freaked out by the idea of unlimited PTO, but it doesn't mean you have to work more to get time off. Also, the snacks help if you have a meeting over lunch or you didn't have time to grab something before coming into the office. The people here are a family and that is sure hard to find!

Cons

I can't complain about much. All jobs have their ups and downs, this one just has way more ups!

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All