Pros
- High Number of Social Events - Many projects to be involved in - Will take literally anybody that is attractive, can play sports, or looked up common interview brain-teasers - Direct Colleagues were great people and worked hard with you - Open to new ideas on how to improve the technology, so long as it didn't interfere with the current project (even if the current project was the wrong move) - Justin Byrd really cares about the people at the company If this is your first job, get your year and go make an extra $10,000 somewhere else. If you have experience at the mid-senior level, I'd just make sure to follow up with your contact/potential boss on some questions on changes in culture and expectations, as maybe they are trying to hire the people to actually change the structure.
Cons
As of early 2020, Team Velocity focused on hiring fresh out of college employees living at home with no experience and required current employees to train them in addition to their current responsibilities (which were already overloaded with work). While it feels like a great beginning for someone fresh out of college, expect to start getting overloaded with responsibilities after a year or so and your name starting to get trashed at the slightest impact on performance. You will be low-balled on your salary, but if you are fresh out of college, what do you know. Unless you have some breakout performances due to working late and teaching yourself industry-based skills, you will maybe get enough of a raise to match inflation. A few big blunders in the years I worked there include: - Changing PTO Plan to unlimited with no heads up, causing accrued time to disappear - Blocking employees from taking time off and paying for their own weekend training for no reason what-so-ever - Favoritism causing people to get repeatedly promoted despite leaving a train-wreck of disasters for the areas they oversaw - Finding email chains about how bad you are at your job - Company Culture of CYA - I'm reasonably sure Exit interviews were recorded and distributed to higher ups without your knowledge (thanks, one-party consent laws), causing some things you said to HR in confidence to make their rounds. - March 2021/COVID handling - Required to be in a single room in the office (because we didn't have enough Zoom licenses) while the CEO & owner of the parent company were remote and telling us how bad COVID was going to get - Half the company being laid off or furloughed for April, the rest of the company getting their pay cut (by 30% or 50% I believe it was) and 401K contributions being paused. We were told, "Work hard for our clients so they will pay us and we can get everyone back" causing employees to work 80 hour weeks in April. Once April was over, the sentiment changed to "We made it through April with half the employees, so why should we hire them back?" The above happened after years of being told how there were 0 lay-offs during the 2008 recession and they have saved up money to make sure they wouldn't have to lay-off someone during hard times again. This was a huge eye-opener for me.