Pros
I was on scientific computing division so pros/cons are from that perspective: - PTO: you get 10 hours PTO every pay period maxing out at 6 weeks. You can charge that time at will (longer periods naturally requiring some notice). - Culture: Kitware has a great inquisitive culture always looking to do things better and more efficiently. - Open source: everything is open source though this varies by client and team. Notable exceptions being the computer vision team and the medical computing team, I'm still not really sure what they worked on besides ITK. - Other employees: everyone is supportive and great to talk with regardless of your experience level and seniority.
Cons
- Not many options for role shift. The politics of Kitware are still strange to me, there are several divisions with division leaders and they manage everything in the division. I never heard of anyone shifting divisions and I believe the heads like to hold on to talent. - Other strange politics. When a new technology or tool comes along there occurs what I'll only describe as internal division warfare where division heads will pit their team's solutions against each other so that it becomes the core tool the rest of the team uses going forward (KW loves their core tools). We had a few competing front-end tools to this effect while I was there and I once saw someone get chastised by a principal engineer for just mentioning that they were working on some tool at the weekly division standup because it competed with another tool in the division. - Division standup. This is for the sci-computing/data-viz teams but standup would take about an hour and I don't see how it could be called worthwhile except by division leads. - Not many others, I want to stress these politics are not so bad if you know how to stay on the edge of them.