Vantaggi
- There are some really great people working at CPXi. It wasn't at all unusual for employees to spend all day working together and then spend a fair bit of time in the kitchens hanging out after work. Some of the other reviewers have called it clique-y but I think its more about finding people you get along with. - Great experience. There's a LOT of work that needs doing at CPXi, and if you like getting your hands dirty (and the execs will let you) you can learn a lot. There's a ton of fire-fighting and quick course-changes (see below), so you can really hone a lot of important soft skills. - Typical internet company bennies - beer and video games in the kitchen, snacks and drinks, work from home if you need it (in most cases), etc. - Solid business model. Leaving out some of the more half-baked initiatives, there's actually a few very solid revenue streams at CPXi which could easily be scaled quite nicely with some effective planning and organization. - Did I mention how great some of the people are? Seriously, there are people busting their humps to make this place run.
Svantaggi
No company only has ONE problem and CPXi has it's share (being in Times Sq sucks) but the big elephant in the room here is the senior management. Few of them have worked anywhere else but CPXi or for themselves, and unfortunately that lack of experience really shows. Specifically: - They don't know what they don't know. Many of them do have solid skills in certain areas, but generally speaking they fall into the "just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous" category, which leads to a lot of unrealistic and unstated expectations, especially around technology and revenue. - Extremely short horizon. If they do any type of long-range planning or road-mapping, they don't share it with anyone but themselves, so most groups have to operate on a very short timeline. If something isn't ready to sell to customers or profitable in the first month it's scrapped, leading to a lot of started projects but very few finished ones. Even allegedly high-priority requests routinely get pushed aside for the "next big thing". - Loyalty goes up, not down. There's a lot of lip-service paid to being an "employee-facing company" but at the end of the day, there's a definite sense coming from the c-suite that the free beer and lack of a dress code gives them the right to squeeze as much as they can out of you before they move on. I've seen MANY good employees who've done nothing but good work, even for several years, let go because either "they don't produce anything" (despite the fact that it's the same execs who prevent them from actually finishing anything) or "the numbers are shaky this quarter".