Pros
- Very relaxed with money culturally
- Very easy to get things done. Not a lot of politics
- Very relaxed deadlines
- Very early in the tech curve, so it was easy to establish some good practices
- Some fantastic colleagues. People are pretty much always wearing a smile, saying hello, and opening doors for you.
- Upper management has interests in technology. They can be fun to talk with. Sometimes it’s easy to blow their minds with some technical knowhow.
- The company was growing financially, doing quite well, and they showed a lot of love to their employees via means of: food, parties, …
- Getting a day off was easy,. Could be done digitally on the same day.
- Many of the senior stakeholders have a lot of love for the employees. Very kind, generous, wanted to do what they can to improve things for others.
- They had a program, “Ovation Cares,” that was designed to offer money in times of hardship. It shows some genuine care and effort for what people may be going through.
Cons
- Was promised a “project based” bonus structure in offer letter. Most likely, this was copy paste from their PM offers… they had no infrastructure or standardization of what tech projects were at my scope. I never got a bonus.
- At my 6mo mark, was promised a bonus from COO at EOY, for high performance. I was instead laid off at EOY.
- Laid off with 2 week notice and 1 month severance. Was advised to seek unemployment if I need more money.
- Was moved between departments at seemingly random times. Kept in the dark, only informed at time of layoff that I was moved because they felt I was underutilized.
- Some stakeholders had obvious feelings / pushback on matters of technical security, likely believing they don’t need much things. E.g., explaining why I can’t secure a public webapp with a static 4 digit pin.
- Some stakeholders don’t respect the process. I spent an unplanned 2 hours in a VPs office while she manually fed me invoices that she expended I’d add up in an Excel sheet on the fly, with no way to validate my work—yet with my name plastered all over the finished product.
- Team used me to work out many of their pet projects and some growing pains. Building web apps, databases, … it became my role. But once I was laid off, the CEO called one of the bigger projects I’d spent time on “just silly.” His opinion was probably that they don’t need the tool, but then he should have spoke his mind earlier. This came across like he didn’t understand my role.
- I pushed for a team to help manage the workload. I feel like that was part of the decision to lay me off.
- work from home was inconsiderable, except for cases where I literally had no way to get to work. Otherwise, you show up.
- No team to help develop anything
- Very high degree of silo-ed skill and information between departments.