Pros
- Dog friendly office - Lots of professional, kind and knowledgeable people
Cons
- Management was the biggest con on the list. With very little diversity, the majority of the C-levels were middle aged white men. Most of upper management were also very inexperienced and didn't seem to have a clear grasp of the impact their frequent changes made. Teams were often shuffled around, reassigned or removed overnight with little to no explanation as to why. This happened frequently over the course of a single year, which seems to highlight the fact that changes weren't well-thought out in the first place. - No clear paths for career advancement. The people who got promoted at Ada were just usually the people who were closest to the people in the ivory towers. In my time at Ada there were multiple architects who came and left because they were unable to impact meaningful change to the development process. - "Unlimited vacation" which you never got to take. It was never a great time to schedule vacation because there would be no one to fill in your responsibilities while you were away, and the deadlines for projects were always so tight that it meant it was never a good time to book vacation anyway. - The code base was awful to work with. There was a huge amount of spaghetti code that existed inside one of two giant spaghetti pot repositories. There was next to no documentation for any of the code, and very sparse unit testing. There were also no automated tests, so things would frequently break after deployments, and you could expect as a developer to set aside time every week for putting out those fires. There was no in-house QA team and it would often be the customers or CSX team who reported broken features. Automated testing was something that was brought up over and over, but management was slow to adopt the idea that you can actually automate the detection of broken features with proper tools and tests. - Terrible benefits package and salary. I took a small pay cut to work at Ada because stock options are one of the things they bake into your offer when you sign. I wish I had just said no to the stock options and asked for more base pay because the stock options are absolutely useless to me after the thinly-veiled "covid" layoff. This probably isn't something you'd expect to hear about a company that lists a "competitive salary" as one of the perks to working there.