Pros
-Director of Operations is the best boss I've ever had -WFH 2x a month -Company growth, in 4 years went from a dozen people to over 35 when I left. -Not micromanaging environment -Great place to start your IT career and learn a little about everything -Made some lifelong friends here. Some very cool and smart people including the network engineering team.
Cons
-Once you get enough skill and experience, the pay is pretty low compared to any other IT consulting firm but especially working as internal IT at a company. Not competitive at all. Not clear if or when you'll get a raise. No annual review and it just kind of happens, it was 15 months since my last pay bump and I ended up leaving for far better pay and less grind. -Not everyone pulls their weight equally especially with skill. Staff will give tickets and tasks or ask to be removed from accounts if it's not a startup they like or systems they are familiar working with. -Skilled staff will get more work dumped on them with more technical jobs or projects. Counterintuitive because we're punishing people that are top performers. -Focus is all on hours billed to client vs quality of work/projects accomplished. A number of staff fudge numbers to make bonus (I've seen it and reported it) but profitability is important. Really should have OKRs instead of make as many hours as possible. Current system incentivizes inefficiency. -Several toxic people have gotten to stay with the company even after being reprimanded multiple times, one still is there. This person threw people under the bus, talked poorly about his colleague who got promoted over him (she was FAR more qualified) and he then threw a temper tantrum in Slack and at after work happy hours. Only to get reprimanded and handed a different new job title made just for him because he threatened to leave. I was in disbelief. There should be a zero tolerance policy for immature and hostile people. -Management life can get very repetitive. People kept quitting and management had to keep filling in the gaps. At one point I was doing 20+hours a week of billable time leaving no time for me to coach/develop/mentor my people. This happened a lot during my 2 years in management. Always felt like we were scrambling and never made gains in management, we just stayed afloat.