Pros
Relaxed dress code Interesting projects Wealth of peer knowledge Very talented developer staff The other devs were cool and good people.
Cons
No management rudder. Fun and relaxed doesn't mean no plan at all. The senior devs were doing all the project management. They are the real heroes of the company. But, they aren't equipped with the skills to handle client's expectations. Management would only show up when the client was pissed and that was just to brown nose and manipulate the client in to being calm. While asking the team to work 16 hour days 7 days a week to complete undocumented change requests. Rude clients (verbal abuse) with no management intervention. They just move you to a different team instead of supporting you to be successful when you make a mistake one month on the project. Little to no guidance during onboarding. I didn't know I was still in the onboarding process months into working on a project. There was no communication that I wasn't expected to be at 100%. So I worked myself to burnout to meet goals that didn't apply at the time. No one stopped me because I was cleaning out the project back log. By developers for developers isn't the best model if you understand developers. None of us were/are business leaders, we are developers. we don't have the skills to handle client relations which leads to clients taking unethical liberties and treating the teams like indentured servants as opposed to people that were hired to help realize/solve an issue that goes well beyond the skill level of the client. That professional relationship wasn't realized and it led to toxic team dynamics and management relationships.