Pros
As mentioned in a number of the other reviews, the biggest strength of FWI is its people. I worked with a lot of great people who were willing to drop everything and help solve problems. Some of the energy and innovation of a startup company is still there. FWI still knows how to have fun at work. I had a good experience with my direct managers being flexible and trying to be fair about distributing responsibilities and workloads. Some of the projects/customers I got to work with were world class. There is a good variety of customers that FWI works with so I got a broad exposure to a lot of different industries on the operations end of the business. This is a good place to work if you're relatively new to the software business, have a positive attitude, and like working in an organization that is rapidly changing. If you're intelligent, have a strong technical acumen, and have a good work ethic, there are opportunities to move up in the organization which may not exist at more established companies. There are opportunities to use cutting edge hardware and AV technology. FWI has a warehouse which also acts as a hardware testing facility. Being able to configure and test hardware internally is a big plus. I had a lot of freedom to solve technical or business problems without a lot of red tape. For all of the criticism of upper management on here, my experience with most of them was that they were legitimately trying to recognize and correct the systemic problems in the business.
Cons
The company has incurred a lot of technical debt because upper management has too often overruled the product and development teams. As a result, portions of the product suite have lagged behind where they should be. This was a consistent pain point for implementation and technical support. The organization, processes, and procedures were constantly changing. A lot of the changes were necessary or beneficial, but a lot of them just created unnecessary confusion. As an employee, it was difficult to keep on top of everything that was happening. The work environment can be chaotic. The office is completely open so it can make it hard to focus on tasks or have phone calls with clients. Doing focused work is difficult. Some people thrive in an open office environment, but I found it challenging and counterproductive. For a software company, there is a disturbing lack of technical knowledge in some areas of the organization which contributes to poor software development practices, product deficiencies, miscommunications with clients, and miscommunications within the organization between departments. If you have a lot of technical knowledge of the products or software development, prepare to be overloaded with work that's been passed on from others in the organization who are incapable of doing it. FWI has a nagging problem with transitioning projects from sales to implementation and from implementation to support. This results in poor knowledge transfer, client frustration, and a lot of stress.
