Pros
At InfoScout, I’ve had the opportunity to vet and choose the technologies that will be used in the next generation of the company’s core product. This flexibility shows that leadership is open to new alternatives and is highly interested in his employees’ opinion. The result of this process is boiled down to the rest of the engineering team, in bi-weekly lunch-n-learn sessions, where we get to learn about what other teams are working on.
Sprint planning, scrum meetings and peer code reviews, continuos deployment/integration are part of the engineering team culture. Even though the company is not a massive organization, sw dev is taken seriously and code is pushed to production several times a day.
InfoScout fosters communication and awareness at its best. Weekly company meetings allow any individuals to get updates on every team, as well as bring up questions on any topic, answered directly by the founders (plus you get catered lunch).
And finally, people are nice around here. That doesn’t happen quite often and you want that. There’s a lot of collaboration and desire to share the knowledge, so we can move the business forward, and have a good time while doing it.
Cons
A software engineering background is probably as far as you can be from the consumer market research industry, which was my case when joining InfoScout. Ergo, you will need to learn this industry. First week will be a massive overload of data regarding the tools and the on-demand platform that InfoScout provides. These could be split across more weeks, in some type of bootcamp format, but then it would delay your effective start date.