Vantaggi
Good starting salary. Good location. It's a good job if you're starting out. Your co-workers are going to be very smart, friendly, helpful and kind, with no backstabbing competitiveness. I must admit, it's easy to take this for granted from time to time.
Svantaggi
The cons are mostly about the management, so I'm going to divide my criticism into 3 parts: direct manager, his manager, and company management/direction. 1. Direct Manager: Extremely inexperienced as a manager. He will always rush you to "fix defects" as soon as possible. Direct managers are not technical at all and will have absolutely no interest in writing good code, dealing with tech debt, understanding the technical challenges of whatever you're working on, etc. They are apparently measured just on the number of defects, so that's what he is focused on at all times. He has an extremely negative presence, and the team feels it. He will make up arbitrary deadlines (often tells the team things like "upper management has asked for this", which no other team can corroborate) and convince you to stay till 7 or 8 pm to work, and, funnily enough, he would leave at 5. Feedback during one-on-ones is non-existent. He would say that he doesn't decide the score out of 5 that we get (he says everyone got a 3, literally every time), or our bonus, or our review, or our raises. When asked how to improve, I have heard the same thing every quarter: do more of what you're doing, which isn't very specific or helpful. It does not seem like he is accountable to anyone for how unprofessionally he handles reviews. He has also forbidden us from spending time during work learning things, which, for software engineers, is incredibly stifling and uninspiring. All in all, possibly the worst manager you can have. Furthermore, there isn't a proper channel to voice my concerns, so there's not much I can do here. 2. His manager: Usually managers in this position are people who have worked at Microstrategy for more than 10 years. So they are very used to how things are done and are very averse to changes in technologies or updates. There is an incredible amount of red tape if you want to voice your ideas, which is why hackathons are such a big deal. It's the only time when employees can work on projects that they think are cool. Some of the best ideas recently have through hackathons. However, senior managers seem to not be interested in those at all in the last couple of years. As such, it's a dull environment intellectually. You will rarely even get to speak to him (might be specific to this particular manager), and he will not know your name or what you're working on. Also, your raises will be less than inflation, which is really disappointing, but not unexpected since he wouldn't even know your name. 3. Upper management ends up deciding everything about the technical direction of the product. Directions change drastically and we are constantly scrambling from one area of focus to another, with no transparency or good communication. Managers get the most visibility and often micromanage about which features or new things we should be working on. We have a number of core values: transparent, agile, precise, cheerful and engaged. Microstrategy technology department fails on all of them.