A culture of escalation fueled by poor leadership
Pros
Mostly fun coworkers and a decent enough location. The challenge to successfully deploy a project can be fun if you have a competitive disposition.
Cons
If you read reviews or talk to employees here you'll hear the people are amazing. And that, I would agree with to a large extent. But it’s also pretty true of lots of software companies. Your coworkers are friends but that is a distraction from what the job is actually like. So let's level set here. At the annual company kickoff in January, FWI "strongly encouraged" employees to add positive reviews to glassdoor to offset what's really going on here. It should be pretty obvious if you read the reviews and look at the dates posted that they are a little fake, disingenuous at best. I’m throwing caution to the wind and giving you an honest look inside Four Winds Interactive. An escalation culture, I say that because it's the standard operating procedure here. It is par for the course to hear a client escalate issues to sales or to the CEO or to a Director and so on. You can see it in the project kickoff deck to clients; we give away contact info to all of leadership and tell them they can reach out to executives. It's an absurd practice you won't find in any other respected company. But what this does is two things, creates a culture in which any issue can be taken up to the executive level of our internal corporate ladder forcing operational team members or development to spend unnecessary time defending themselves and secondly, it enables our clients to have a sense of entitlement. And this makes sense because this a sales company first, a software company second. Leadership that often sells non-existent products or products that are in reality in beta form at best. I've seen in meetings where it's articulated something isn't ready for Market and the Director or Executive says, release it anyway. The motivation is clear, we sell it in this unfinished state to big companies in hopes that we can land and expand. This is a practice that was effective in the younger years but the catalog of products has exploded, both in hardware and software. There just isn't the bandwidth to launch all these products and then try to keep them from crashing post deployment. See the heart of the matter is we pitch that we are technologically agnostic and can accommodate any platform or network. Translation, you can't master anything if you try to do everything. And this constantly expanding product line means the ever increasingly buggy and non-user friendly software doesn't get fixed like it should. Example, a bug that crippled a major feature in 5.3 wasn't accepted as a real problem until 5.4 and isn't slated to be addressed until 5.6. Why it broke, no one seems to fully understand and it's not being investigated because resources are busy making the next shiny new feature. Look the CEO, although well intentioned, is similar to an entitled rich kid used to getting what he wants. He thinks of an idea and suddenly it must be a product despite any proof of ROI. It's pitched as visionary when the reality is it's lack of focus and discipline. That's to be expected when you surround yourself by yes men/women, none of which truly know how to do proper business analysis. Adding to the problem is that a significant portion of leadership hired their friends from previous jobs for roles here. Or internal employees are promoted to incompetence because they played politics and tell executives what they want to hear. Data doesn't drive business objectives, opinions do. This is the culture you are walking in to. This is why the most talented employees tend to leave in the 2-4 year range. It's also a main reason you don't see the same executive level leadership from 3-5 years back. You'll come into the company optimistic, but your motivation to make a positive impact will be destroyed by the end of year one. All-in-all, I do not recommend this place and I say that objectively. If you are coming in for an interview, ask specifics on the day to day process and pain points. Take time to drill down into the companies project and development process and you will see, the above isn't a harsh opinion, it's cold hard facts. Do not be fooled by the fake smiles, pay attention to the demeanor of the operations team members. I do not recommend this company and I do not recommend the software.
