Vantaggi
I am working in a team that has great autonomy and great teammates of 15 people. We work on multiple products so everybody in our team get to work on few projects at the same time. There are very little involvement from senior / executive level and team has so much freedom of developing own idea, prototype, test and go through the lean style. Because there are very little guidance, who stands up and voice out gets more opportunity. This company has a structure as a corporation but very young in terms of maturity. So there are tons of room for you to propose new thinking and try out. Most people leave work by 6pm. At 6:30pm, company is 90% empty. That means you rarely work late. Very liberal for letting employee to work from home for any reasons, or leave early for any emergency. For example, if you have to be out of state for few weeks for family emergency, you may request to your team and supervisor to work remotely for that duration. So, if you have a passion in other stuff, like arts, music, etc, this is a great work place that enable you to pursue both. In fact, many people are doing it.
Svantaggi
Management always talk about salary should not be compared to other companies outside of education field. If you need a lot of guidance in your career development, this may not be a good place since you can pretty much get left alone without being assigned much. So if you are not self started, self motivated people, then this is not a good place. Design thinking is not truly practiced here. People with that kind of training do struggle a bit since entire company is not striving to become design driven company. Unlike Google or other tech firms, office environment is decent but not fantastic. They certainly put less money for office environment compare to Twitter, Skype, Google or Airbnb. Services for employees are limited. No free lunch, no free healthy snacks, no massage service, no laundry service, no play room. They do have shower room, bike racks, free sodas (and orange/apple/grapefruit juice), popcorn, etc. Occasionally, there are company parties offers some food and drinks. Too much divide between teams and divisions. Very difficult to learn what rest of company is doing unless you make friends with people outside of your team, division or business unit. Company is not yet practicing design thinking in full scale.
