Pros
I’ll start with the pro’s; PayIt is the best tech company in Kansas City, and if you’re unable to find remote work, have no experience, or are stuck in KC for some reason, this is probably the best tech company in the greater midwest area. The tech stack is modern, the engineers are fantastic, and the domain (government services for state/local) is exciting, challenging, interesting, and stable. It’s likely lucrative if you’re at the top, but more on that in the “cons” section.
Cons
The “people manager”, Phillip Swope, is by far the worst HR professional I’ve ever worked with. To give you some background; I’ve worked in silicon valley for 10+ years, at top companies such as Twitch, Metromile, A16Z startups, etc. I’ll paint a picture of what it was like to work there. For the first three months, I did absolutely nothing. Phil and the VP of eng (Bharat) made me come drive into the office, 5 days a week, and sit there with zero direction or instruction. There is nobody in the office except me and the office manager (who is friendly and great). My manager is AWOL and refuses to communicate. I burn the first three months on a “contract-to-hire” scheme that tested nothing. After this trial period, they decide that I’ve earned the right to be a “software engineer” (L3 or L4 at normal tech firms). I’ve led teams and managed multi-million user deploys (40+ million DaUs at Twitch), but since there is zero infrastructure for training, testing, hiring, or cultivating engineering talent, you basically get shuffled into a grab-bag engineering department and expected to “crush JIRA tickets” to succeed. Fine by me. To credit, PayIt is a very stable company with multi-year contracts with major cities and states throughout N/A. If you want a boring corporate job that pays the bills and ignores any hope of career advancement, this is the place. It’s founded and run by ex-Cerner folks, so if you’re familiar with the culture there, it’s exactly like that, with maybe a 10% improvement at the margins. The tech stack is nice and the engineers are truly talented. The byline of corporate tech jobs is that software engineering is a cost center, not a profit center. The engineers are paid *way* below market rate; many talented people here could make $180,000+ easily at any modern tech firm, but are stuck in $110,000 salaries with ZERO benefits; besides a paltry health care package there’s no parking provided, no stock options, no budget for training or conferences, no relocation, no anything. Two people in particular made the job hell; one engineer who had been around “forever” and was horrible to work with (grossly overengineering everything about the core platform, refused to show up to daily standups for an entire year), and of course the “people manager”, Phil, who would make a great manager at a regional McDonalds or something but knows absolutely nothing about technology or how to evaluate talent properly. In short; if you want a job, and can glue some scripts together to make your boss happy for substandard pay, this is the place for you. If you care about technology, or are very good at what you do, and have product experience at tech companies that move fast, get things done, and compensate their employees appropriately, look elsewhere. Hired.com and other marketplaces will put you in touch with firms that may not treat you better but at least pay you well.