Engineering the future... the poor man's way.
Pros
- Very good profit-sharing bonus (FR : "I&P"), only 2nd to the ones in banking AFAIK. About 20% of annual salary. - A lot of advantages like best French work council (FR : "CE"), facilities (parking, cantina, sport rooms, a lot of different classes) - Final products are quite amazing, powerful. - Atmosphere is rather relaxed. - Regular traineeships. 1/year let's say. - Some top companies have been bought recently (but quite some people have left them since)
Cons
- A lot of people don't know how to program. This seems normal when you know that a lot of people do not come from the IT world but are mechanical etc engineers. - Bad technical ecosystem. They do everything in-house, and succeed in some process'/tools/FWs, but just don't have the manpower/skillfulness to compete with existing market solutions. If you prefer using git/C++ stdlib etc, don't go there :D - Some subjects keep resurfacing every 3-6 years, with no solution to them. - Internal competition leads to instability, wrong people at the wrong places, pressure. - Management chain is big, and too many technical decisions are made by the top who are simply unrealistic delay-wise. The code-base is too big and sloppy and redundant to efficiently do something. - Too much heterogeneous software practices, software... companies that are bought aren't ingested properly (or left to be there way). - Takes 5-10 years to become a manager of more than a few people