Vantaggi
The People: a young and generally motivated workforce helps to drive innovation and keep day to day life interesting. The Location: Convenient location in walking distance of a major light rail station, with company subsidization, as well as a prime spot at the intersection of two large roads helps keep the job in reach for employees living around Atlanta. Change in Ownership: VMWare's purchase appears to have had largely positive affects with regards to benefits and employee pay. Additionally, the change has moved the company out of start-up mode, so instead of product-product-product, there is a shift going on towards quality that benefits employee well being.
Svantaggi
The Management: The company leadership at the AirWatch level is still driven by a sales-first principle that keeps R&D from ever getting to work towards product quality. Pushing to change from the start-up 'land grab' thought process where market share is everything to a more established company's concern for providing quality to its customers will make employees, investors, and customers happy. We've got the market share, now lets make the product work right. Support Organization Training: R&D is directly involved in day-to-day support, because the PSO/Support organization does not receive adequate training in the product prior to being thrown to the wolves. QA and Development resources are dedicated to what is essentially tier 4 support for entire product release cycles (which damages the quality of new code going out the door due to resource squeeze) on a per team basis, and there is a real sense that the R&D team is the end-all, be-all of where the buck stops for any issue. Given the nature of this belief in the company, support team members are not incentive to do any critical thinking or problem solving, as the solution to most customer issues is to push a ticket to the R&D team for support, after which they can offload responsibility for the issue. Better training for the support team would prevent the issue with R&D resource allocation (making the product better, making support less time consuming, etc.), and help provide better support to the customer. Hiring Policies: Internally, there appears to be a feeling that quality can be driven by adding additional BA/PM team members to a scrum/product group, while having a sometimes 3:1 or 4:1 developer to QA ratio. QA is asked to certify releases with little to no real time to test the product fully, which results in quality loss (and employee frustration). Instead of trying to drive quality through development/PM, try to build teams with a more reasonable ratio (2:1 Dev to QA?), so that real quality can be a focus instead of a pipe-dream.