Pros
- has a "tech company" vibe - free breakfast - lots of snacks - some smart people
Kontras
A lot of the engineers are lazy. They're not looking for new ways to do things. They only do things the way things are set at AllState. This is not a good mindset for engineers to have at an insurance company trying to be a tech company. Granted, there are a couple engineers who are decent, but I've worked with engineers with 7+ years of experience at AllState who are significantly worse engineers than engineers I've worked with in the past with 3-5 years of experience. On top of lazy engineers, there is a MAJOR disconnect between business and engineering. Nobody on the business side seems to have a technical background, and if they do, it's very minimal and nobody understands the proper stages of a SDLC. This leads to a product being built without having a proper planning and design phase, which makes an application's success rate plummet and also makes scaling an application up near impossible. I've seen applications that have taken years to build turn out worse than an application a senior computer science engineering student had built in a semester.