Vantaggi
Engineering management genuinely cares about the people that work there. They will give you opportunities to improve if you end up struggling. They also are very good to work with you around family life, illness, etc. The engineering department is making very serious efforts to modernize and automate to give the developers more time to create and to ensure product quality, something that has been badly needed. Upward progress has recently been clearly defined and there is a path now for promotions and what the expectations are for advancement. They are trying very hard to come up with perks to help with retention when funds aren't available for at market rates for engineers. Remote options, very flexible schedules, etc.
Svantaggi
Pay - you'll see this on almost every review. I have lost too many good co-workers due to low pay and it is painful. Engineers working at a level 4 or 5 can leave Sirsi to go to a company across the street, or even to a company in the same parking lot, to work at a level 1 or 2 and make 15k-20k more a year. Sirsi's customer base isn't retail - they have a very limited set of customers, so it is understandable, but retention is horrible because of it. Tenure based promotions rather than skill based - you can be an absolute rock star but unless you've 'put in your time' you won't get a promotion. This isn't to say they don't reward good efforts, bonuses are a thing, if small, and you can get promoted ahead of schedule in some cases, but it is rare. Retention - there are some trickle down issues with the retention problems. There aren't enough engineers on staff to make it easy to remove under-performing employees. They do try hard to give struggling employees better opportunities to succeed - they'll move people to different teams if there are personality issues or if someone happens to be better at a different aspect of programming than others (front end vs back end, etc). That is great - but often, poor performing employees stick around for a very long time, then end up with lots of product knowledge that makes them even harder to remove. Too much vaporware - we still have a tendency to sell products that don't actually exist and then scramble to build it out afterwards. This is very painful for the engineers who would have loved to have had time to build out a solid product that produced the desired result, but often this vaporware is tied into contracts with customers and has a set release date with penalties if not delivered...that almost always ends as you would expect. The health benefits are really about the worst I've had to deal with in 15 years of employment. Very high deductible plans, next to zero matching contributions for the HSAs that are supposed to help offset the costs. Lots of co-insurance.