Pros
The people are kind, supportive and passionate. They will help you through your issues as best as they can, and you can trust them to have your back. The consultancy aspect is useful to learn to ramp up quickly in new contexts and to learn to handle a variety of teams and stakeholders. The projects are not always the best for career development, but if you're willing to overlook that and focus on more general skills you can learn from them, you can learn a lot. Overall, 8th Light can be a useful stepping stone in someone's career.
Cons
The company has moved from being people-oriented to being very profit-oriented. Leadership struggles with financial forecasting, which has led to multiple lay-offs in the last year. The decisions they make tend to be reactive and the logic behind these can be difficult to understand, particularly when employees push back on them and leadership's response amounts to "you wouldn't understand, just trust us". The culture has changed from being relatively transparent, conducive to discussions and reflection to becoming a culture of fear where silence and compliance are valued above the rest. The psychological safety of the company has drastically deteriorated over the last year, and there is an atmosphere of being surveilled that incentivise employees to keep to themselves instead of sharing, participating and supporting each other. The promotion process is unreliable. It's not uncommon for people and their managers to believe they meet the criteria for promotion only to be denied it with vague explanations as to why, and no suggestions of how to get it the next time around. It only creates a culture of burnout and quiet quitting as efforts are not recognised and not rewarded meaningfully. A lot of things done at 8th Light feel performative and exercises in box-ticking without real thoughts about who this benefits, or the actual impact on people who are too often dismissed and silenced when raising concerns. In the same vein, communications, particularly from HR, are often vague, without genuine value and sometimes very untimely. Veiled threats and lies are also not uncommon and thorny questions are regularly dismissed or ignored outright. Some of the leadership team members are problematic (hostile behaviour, bullying, gaslighting, etc.) but are repeatedly given more chances with no apparent mechanism to hold them accountable, and no requirement to do good by (and no protection for) the people who've been impacted. The compensation and benefits are far from competitive and have been getting worse as leadership is progressively cutting everything off to save money and reverting as many things as they can to the bare acceptable minimum. The salary adjustments are lacking when they happen at all. The company struggles to find its niche, and has tried to do too many things at once, giving up quickly and moving on to the next buzzword when it didn't stick fast enough. It has failed to refine and modernise its previous commitment to software craft and instead decided to change strategy in favour of who knows what it's even supposed to be anymore.