Pros
The biggest pro for me is I do not feel like a number here, I really feel this company does care for its employees. They would like employees back at the office, but are still allowing fully remote work over COVID. Even when eventually they do return, I think they will be flexible and allow fully remote roles. When in the office they go the extra mile to make you happy, and to feel safe. Every now and then they introduce refresh Fridays - which is a half day where employees are encouraged to spend time with families. We have constant updates meetings, so people feel they are not left in the dark. Rory hosts a lot of these meetings with a lot of positive energy, and he gives a strong impression he really cares for the company and the employees. Compensation is good, and we have good bonuses to top this up. Benefits are good too, such as generous holiday and paternity. Teams and management are very good, people always try to help each other and the flexibility is beyond what I have seen elsewhere. There are also lots of knowledge sharing sessions. Another big pro is the company always aims to improve. Company wise I feel this is the best company I have ever worked for.
Cons
I often feel this role doesn't play to my strengths. As a developer - I do feel this role is more of an IT and support role than development. It feels most of my time is spent looking through excessive logs, fixing pipelines, updating config, and trying to see why network, or infrastructure software is not working. Not having a strong IT / networking background makes this a bit hard. The company goals I have seen and set this year don't make me feel this will change anytime soon. I am happy to learn the IT side, but the tech to learn is so large, and constantly changing that it is hard to know what to focus on. There is too much technology. Teams all work on different tech stacks and languages, and you need to be involved in the whole stack across teams. I don't really like this because we cover areas too large and this doesn't work well with the way I personally learn (although some really like this style) so learning is very slow. Unfortunately this looks like it will increase in the future. Things often feel slow, there is just so much admin now, and releases take days. Another big negative to me is that we are on call on average once per week, which is quite a lot coming from a background with little to no on call.