Good place to build experience, problematic long-term
Pros
* The benefits package is quite good. There are a lot of various perks as well (free coffee and snacks, pool and ping-pong tables, nice office space with showers and bike racks). * There's a variety of tech stacks in use from one project to the next, so it exposes you to several different languages and frameworks. The mix of new products and existing ones also provides a good mix of experience. A couple years here will give you a pretty solid resume for any full-stack dev jobs. * Working on geospatial apps isn't something you get to do very often, so if you're into that sort of thing the experience will be very educational (personally though, I didn't find it as interesting as I thought I would). * The 10% time for R&D is nice. * Coworkers are generally smart and nice, and the general culture combined with being a flat organization prevents workplace politics. Apart from a slight tendency towards passive-aggression, it's pretty easy-going.
Cons
* The salary is definitely below market; on paper, this is made up by the benefits package, but the platinum HMO plan didn't seem much better than mid-tier insurance for anything I used it for, so unless you have a family with unusually high medical bills it will probably be a net loss. * Since Azavea is a niche consulting shop, eventually the work often seems to lack depth and becomes repetitive (there's only so many permutations of "put map in a web app, render some additional data over it, add some bells and whistles 6 months later"). There are exceptions when some new client comes in, but that's not very frequent (they're a niche-focused company), and you're not guaranteed any chance to work on the project. * Azavea *worships* at the altar of scrum, which is problematic in a couple ways. Most notably, management is dishonest about the relationship between "the process" and how it affects staff. They parrot the agile doublespeak about story points just being relative estimates, story point totals not being used to evaluate employee performance, etc. but it's an outright lie. Story points per sprint is the *only* rubric used to evaluate employee performance, which *might* be fine for feature-factory "body shop" type consulting work, but it fails totally when work involves refactoring, solving an especially difficult problem, optimization, or tracking down bugs. During my time there, several senior-level devs were either fired or micromanaged into finding new jobs because they took time to track down hard-to-find bugs, refactor garbage code, write tests, or thoroughly review and test teammates PRs. That sounds like something good devs and good teammates should do, but since there weren't story points tied to those activities, when performance review time came all those hours just vanished in the wind. And keep in mind, performance reviews were done by the CEO, the COO, and the respective product manager and team lead, so this is basically the company culture. Similarly, the consequence on the actual software product was obvious, since a lot of critical elements of software development don't fit nicely into the two-week story-pointed sprint model. Generally speaking, none of the teams at Azavea seemed to invest in writing adequate (or sometimes *any*) unit-/regression-/acceptance-tests (which is dangerous for Python or Javascript apps). There was never any time spent refactoring old or hacky code, or thinking through better abstractions that will result in better dev ergonomics, or re-architecting something to be higher quality rather than just add another layer of duct-tape. So you won't get experience tackling those types of problems, which means your time there should definitely have an expiration date if you want to be deemed senior- or lead-engineer material in the broader job market.
