Quite a bit of travel(can be viewed as good or bad). Travel is said to be "optional" but typically results in people being forcibly coerced to go places even if it just doesn't fit their schedule for the week (people have lives outside of work!). Tends to be more of a hassle when they want engineers to travel on weekends (Friday evenings and Sundays mostly) because there is no compensation for time lost even if you have a full day worth of travel delays or other issues that arise.
Management is not properly trained on how to handle employees. This does not apply to all management here, but not all great workers are meant to be in management especially when they do not have a high emotional and social IQ, this results in a lot of awkward, forced, and often unneeded interactions. Depending on who are you dealing with, management can range from no communication at all except at times where interaction is mandatory (like conferences, bonus season, etc.) all the way to managing each second of your day. The latter results in a very uneasy work environment where you don't even feel comfortable having a casual conversation because it is constantly being monitored by those who feel they always need to be involved in some way. In addition, it seems odd that management actively tries to convince employees that they need to be working more hours on weekends and holidays to add to the value of the company when most efforts in this area result in no more compensation and not even added recognition. Do for your employees and they shall do for you.
Nonexistent investment in employees. Feels as though you are hired only to learn their product and nothing else so you can't build real value and only remain valuable to them. Of course you can learn things on your own at work or outside of work, but DP does not invest any money into allowing employees to properly develop their skills for things like coding, modeling, training, or IT (since so much of the tech support role relies on IT skills that have never been developed).
Company Transparency. The company is not very forthright with their specific vision moving into the future. Organization in this area can be considered chaotic because you typically don't find out about certain higher level decisions on products until the last second aka when a bad product or idea is released or pushed forward. There needs to be more accountability here so that everyone in the company knows exactly what is going on at all times otherwise it creates a divided system. Very bad products should not be allowed to be released but on top of that, certain products and events need to be constantly reevaluated to see if there is even a good financial reason to continue on with further investment. Also, company moves painstakingly slow when it comes to any potential for promotions or ways they can make things better for employees (compensation for weekend travel as an example).
Sales. This is an issue in particular because of their effect on the training that AEs must provide to customers. Constantly, AEs are put into a situation of having to explain or determine how to make a feature in the software work that obviously should have been removed several iterations ago. It almost seems like certain things are left in the software because their very existence can increase revenue when mentioned to prospective and current customers (not like they know upfront what features don't work in the software). Stop thinking about your wallet and think about the bigger picture.
The software itself can be even seen as a con because of how embarrassingly outdated it looks and feels. Then we as engineers are expected to preach highly of a product that crashes constantly and is very unstable. If there are issues with the software, we are told not to tell the customer it’s a bug because bugs are bad!! All software companies have issues and that’s fine, but call it what it is and your customers and employees will respect you more for it. Bugs are expected with any software and that’s why patches are released.
