Pros
Salary was on par with other companies
Cons
In a healthy IT organization, the end users define what they need, and the IT department figures out how to get it done and how long the work will take: requirements -> scope -> deadlines. At Sharper Image, the CEO sets the scope and the deadlines based on how badly he wants something, regardless of how IT thinks it should be done or how long it might actually take, the CTO then enforces the arbitrary and often impossible deadlines, and the developers scramble. In my area, the CEO claimed to be focused on accuracy, but he only pushed for speed, as if these weren’t completely opposing forces. It’s like pushing down on one side of a teeter totter and expecting the other side to go down as well. It fails the test of simple common sense. For a big project I was asked to lead, I was told what the first phase had to be (build an entire data warehouse on an unfamiliar cloud platform from scratch) and how quickly I had to get it done (four weeks), and when I said that would be extremely difficult, I was scolded for being a coward. I had no time for analysis or design, it was just build and release. Even taking time to test was met with resistance, yet paradoxically it also had to be perfect before any users laid eyes on it. To try to meet these impossible standards, I worked 65-70 hr weeks for nearly two months, including a 20 hr day and a 10 hour day separated by only 4 hours of sleep. This was not, was never, enough. The CTO hounded me, routinely misinterpreting everything I said in the worst possible ways and insinuating incompetence, laziness, and even malfeasance. Just before the two month mark, I backed my hours down to a mere 50-60 hrs per week, as I was suffering from physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Around the four month mark, it was discovered that the project had run way over budget and was scrapped in its entirety, erasing 100% of my work. Fortunately, I had already found a new job before they could use this as an excuse to fire me. Unfortunately, I seem to have some PTSD to work through. If you’re in IT and you’re looking for a place where you can do high quality work and be treated with trust and respect, or even decency, do not apply to Sharper Image.