Avantages
The work itself mattered, supporting education technology felt like I was contributing to something important. Some really solid people on the team who genuinely cared.
Inconvénients
After the acquisition everything went downhill fast. They cut our team in half but somehow expected us to do the same amount of work. Leadership's solution? "Just automate it." or "Have AI do it for you." Sure, because automation doesn't need maintenance or break constantly and AI always gets it right every time.
Management was completely out of touch. They'd oversimplify really complex technical problems until someone told them what they wanted to hear. We were responsible for systems that made the company actual money but got zero support, no architects, nothing. Just constant on-call and putting out fires with nowhere near enough people.
Classic private equity move, they gutted experienced staff who knew how everything worked. After years of keeping everything running and supporting the business through endless late nights and weekend work, they just laid a bunch of us off. The mission clearly doesn't matter anymore, just squeezing out profit.
It was all firefighting all the time without the resources to actually fix anything properly.