Pros
Nearly all of the engineers are motivated, smart, care about learning, hard working, and fun to be around. Engineers work hard to promote best practices despite external limitations, and the engineering activities are educational. Technical interviews are tough and fair. Modern technologies and languages are promoted. The office features a beer-keg, a fridge stocked with drinks, and snacks. Annual bonuses were issued in 2014. Office hours and work from home are typically very flexible. Team structure is mostly flat. The company cares a lot about culture, which means fun and great people. Mixed: The volatile nature of consulting leads to working on many projects, which is educational and stressful. Company growth is mind blowing. Company Kool-Aid is heavily spiked. Hours worked average around 45 for most engineers. Benefits leave much to be desired. The office environment is uncomfortable, so visit it in person.
Cons
At the IDC, you will become an “OpenText Media Manager expert” and tasked with creating plugins, data migrations, installs, upgrade, or customization for this legacy software. Don’t believe the hype around innovation, internal products, or entertainment industry. Projects are as boring as they come. Consulting is a significant part of daily work including estimates, client headaches, meetings, spreadsheets, deadlines, client calls, and more meetings. Some projects feature more consulting tasks than engineering work. Engineering best practices often do not happen because of lack of billable resources, single-engineer projects, non-technical PMs, deadlines, and demanding clients. Stress is a huge problem. Lucky engineers get boring projects. Unlucky engineers are assigned projects that feature excessive meetings, zero influence, unrealistic deadlines, unqualified PMs, frustrating clients, and projects unrelated to their skillset. Many projects have a consultant acting as project managers, and making decisions they’re not qualified to make. Some engineers work 2 to 3 projects at once. A 2-person project was so miserable that 3 engineers quit in less than 6 months. Management pretends to care and hypes change during team-meetings, but never follows through. Engineers have minimal project influence, and estimations are broken. Typically unqualified non-technical consultants, managers, and clients determine project specs and rough estimate without engineers, then demand for rushed estimates and waterfall style project-plans with little notice or information, which later becomes deadlines. Finally, a word of warning about overtime. Only hours billable to a client over a quarter qualify. You will rarely see overtime due to fixed-bid projects, vacations, sick days, unbillable company activities, and gaps between projects. The IDC isn’t a terrible place to work, but below average for Austin.