Pros
Could look good on your CV
Free lunch on a FridayCons
Where do you begin - the list is potentially endless!
The company is run like a start-up - every decision no matter how trivial has to be approved by one of a few of the upper-echelon managers.
General employees (sales/dev/support/etc) are treated as a throw-away commodity and are over-worked until they burn out or get fed up and leave.
Middle management have no power to do anything useful - they get grief from the staff under them about the work & environment but have to sing a happy tune to the executives so as not to draw any unwanted attention.
Nothing is managed in a pro-active manner - everything is run as a fire-fighting operation, including some very big projects.
They regularly acquire other companies, not so much for their technologies but to get their customer lists - not surprising as their selling strategy seems to be tell the customer "yes, we can provide that - in fact we have it already" then fob them off while dev staff frantically cobble together some flakey solution that gets shipped to the customer - definitely a "take the money and run" approach.
Customer facing staff are pretty much guaranteed not to be able to take any holidays in the final 3 weeks of any quarter (and YES that does include Christmas) as this is when the final push for sales etc is made and God forbid that the company didn't make the sale in the last few days of the quarter beacuse someone was on leave with their family.Advice to Senior Management
Start running the company like the multi-billion dollar business its supposed to be and not like some 10-man outfit - if you can't do that then step back and employ some people who can.
Also, listen to (and value) your staff. If you want to be one of the leading software companies in the UK/World then you need to appreciate the staff you have and the potential that they offer the company.
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