Pros
I've worked at HighGear full time for over 7 years, and I love my job! I've worked at a lot of different companies as a software engineer, and this one is the best. If I were to try to distill it down to a few reasons I love working here, the first would be the genuine relationships I have with my coworkers and management. There's no pressure to hang out outside of work, but we definitely do so and I enjoy that we all can have fun together and that we genuinely care about each other personally. It makes working together during business hours so much more effective and fun! I also deeply appreciate the high standards that we continuously strive for. Sometimes I think I've done everything I could do to make a customer successful and then my supervisor will walk over and suggest additional steps to help the customer, which sometimes include investigating and fixing problems with customer servers that are outside the scope of our product. I've grown far more at this job than at any other because of the high standards of service that permeate how we do business and serve our clients. It's a really good feeling to have happy clients and to know that I've made a large impact in making them successful. In addition, HighGear is a very exciting product to work on. As a software engineer, I love that I get to solve challenging problems "under the hood" but even more importantly, solving these challenging problems is making our customers more and more successful with every release. Connecting the intrinsic enjoyment of engineering with the extrinsic payoff of successful, happy customers is the best kind of reward.
Cons
Everyone at HighGear values their health, their families, and their personal lives. None of us regularly work more than 40 hours a week, and management is proactive in helping us when we're overwhelmed or have too much work to do. Having said that, HighGear is still small enough to be considered a start-up, and as such working at HighGear is not a 9-5 job where you can check out after work. We have clients who run their businesses on HighGear and who rely on us to provide continued value in the form of regular, on-time new releases of the software as well as provide support to them when they have problems. Being successful in a role at HighGear requires someone who is fully committed and passionate to make our customers successful and willing to step out of their comfort zone when necessary.