Vantaggi
- High salary, especially in Madison, Wisconsin where living cost is low. - Decent 401K, healthcare, vacation, thick leave, and other opportunities. - Work-life balance is manageable. Working over-time was not frequent in my team, and even when it happens, the hours are not that late (7 P.M. latest). - Beautiful campus.
Svantaggi
- Main product is still based on ancient technology (Visual Basic 6.0, released in 1998). If you are assigned to be a VB developer, too bad. None of the skills you learned will be transferable. - They are trying to transition to a web frontend and C# backend. However, the process is painful. Currently they just inserted an IE browser inside their legacy VB framework as a temporary solution, which is annoying to work with and causes many bugs. I don't see the "real" transition to pure web frontend happening anytime soon. - Since their software is safety-critical (used in hospitals), there are many rounds of code review and QA. You will spend 80%+ time dealing with red tape, and 20%- time writing code. - The winter in Madison, Wisconsin is long and brutal. Around 6 months per year of close-to-zero Fahrenheit. Think about this before you go.