Vantaggi
There is a recently an effort to hire colleagues with international experience, stronger backgrounds, and make a shift into adopting more modern ways of working. There's some genuinely good people who're trying to improve things.
Svantaggi
The presence of "Excel" in many of aspects of software development is a very telling sign of the inefficiencies of the company. A very strong lack of an agile framework, most features seem to be helicoptered down to engineers without any type of critical thinking, creativity or discussion. But the core issue relates to the identity of the company which feels torn between "building a product" vs "building things for X Y Z customer". It feels often like a "fintech" development agency which builds features "sur mesure" for specific customers. There's no visible long term product vision (or that vision isn't communicated). When you're trying to be two things at the same time, you end up being mediocre at both of them. Agency type, customer-focused type of work requires speed, execution, and a strong customer communication - tightly coupled with your execution teams. You need to know what you're building, how long it's going to take you, how much you need to make for it, and how you can expand your growth in a sustainable manner. Product-type of work requires a long term vision for the product, user feedback, a lot of analytics, leaders with prior experience in similar products, a strong design team embedded into your product team, (provided you have one), and ultimately a very different business model.