Pros
The people I worked with were exceptional, once-in-a-lifetime coworkers, and the focus on customer satisfaction and quality product was both honorable and heart-felt. For a fairly large company with offices around the world, it was remarkably easy to communicate with other employees and collaborate on projects or leverage regional knowledge or specialization. This provided a strong sense of company loyalty and community that I hold to this day. Exact had great benefits, never turned down a vacation request, and management at all levels appeared to be truly interested in ideas to improve productivity, the product, or the top and bottom lines.
Kontras
Exact Software is a global company relentlessly focused on profitability and productivity, and it has some of the highest profit-per-employee numbers in the industry. The translation? Working at Exact can be very stressful, with seemingly endless strings of deadlines and management always pushing for more. It was not uncommon to work between 12 and 16 hours each day for six to ten months at a time, year over year. Despite efforts by regional management to relieve work-loads, corporate-mandated hiring freezes and ever-increasing profit targets conspired to keep everyone in the trenches. Communication of Corporate Strategy in tangible terms was almost non-existent, and this complicated the (what appeared to be) yearly restructuring uneccessarily.
