Vantaggi
Excellent design. The design team and principals produce concepts that are top-of-class or near-to. They make anything look beautiful, only sometimes looking dated or with recognizable habits. I saw a lot of competing work in both print and web that UpShift handily outclasses. Expectations for code were mostly end-focused. This means that there's lots of freedom in how devs set up shop to make sites. Supervisors worked with me to elect specific tools and goals to measure performance and other success metrics, so there was strong ownership in how I identified what made my web apps "good." There are a few parameters (some reasonable, some consequence of role), that result in becoming a "T-shaped" developer with a webmaster-like skillset: code-adjacent tasks like typical DNS and host work, some VPS management, occasionally dealing with other weird multi-role external systems. I was able to assist with and advise a lot of client IT teams this way. Leadership is flexible. Partners accommodated most requests. Most operational issues or grievances could be resolved with a few minutes of conversation. Weekly Show and Tell is a recent great idea. This could be expanded to less frequent team demos to show more involved work or "here's what I learned" types of presentations.
Svantaggi
UpShift is far from perfect, but I think the most negative reviews here come from net bad hires with mismatched expectations. Resistance from the top to some changes. Partners challenged proposals to transition to web design-focused software. It would expectedly cause growing pains in adapting to using different apps between print and web, but using InDesign for web design felt antiquated compared to using any of the modern web design apps. Resistance from design team to some modern practices. There wasn't a lot of focus on adapting for accessibility after the news and client wave of ADA/WCAG issues. It wasn't that hard to figure out how to create and measure web and design items for accessibility, but there are missed opportunities on simple items text contrast over background colors. Accessible websites might seem like overkill, but it's only a little more research and tweaks to the way websites are built for a characteristic that makes the work much more professional and into world-class. Resistance from web team to more modern practices. Limited use of code repositories resulted in some in-house plugins and redistributed code being difficult to track across different projects.