Pros
I was a programmer at LocalEdge and learned an incredible amount there. That was due, entirely, to the peers that I worked with. I ended up working with some of the best software developers of my career. The technology stack is a blast. When I was there it was largely Java, Spring, Hibernate and friends. All of this was running on Tomcat in production. Some of the tooling we used: Maven, HG, Jenkins. There was a general attitude toward improving skills and tools. We had enough latitude that we could take a step back and evaluate solutions without being forced to dive into the quickest or easiest one. We even had enough leeway to put new tools in place and change existing procedures and architectures. The salary and benefits were pretty decent for the area.
Kontras
My direct managers were fantastic so from this point on any reference to "management" refers to the levels above them. Criticism and concern is taken as negativity. If a product or feature or technical initiative is presented and you see a flaw or a way to improve and raise your concern you are viewed as difficult and negative. Perhaps even an overt trouble maker. Most catch on to this and stop speaking up, leading to low standards and stagnation and products that don't reach their potential or improve. To all the former and current salesmen reading this: we tried. Please believe me, we tried so hard to build great products. Culture of Expert Beginnerism. There are a group of people who have been with the company a long time and who opted out of learning a long time ago. They think technologies and business practices and product decisions that worked 15 years ago are sound today. Most get frustrated with this and eventually leave; The Dead Sea Effect. This culture causes raises and promotions to be based on time logged, not merit, which exacerbates the problem. Micromanagement. Most of the time things went pretty smoothly but once in a while someone from above your manager would swoop in and make your life a living hell for a few weeks. It would almost seem deliberate and bordered on harassment, sometimes crossing cleanly into it. It could be anything. Getting nitpicky about colors or layouts. This button has to move over there. Usually a lot of UI-type stuff. It could come in the form of some legacy page that no one uses any longer but which doesn't work for certain inputs. It's been unchanged for 3 years but now, because the CEO saw it, you have to drop everything, fix it, and deploy it. This one usually happened at about 5pm and would be accompanied by a, "how could you have let this happen?!" even though you never knew the code base existed before now. Many business and technical decisions would be based on emotion instead of logic. Usually to protect egos and make someone feel important. Sometimes out of fear for how they thought their superior wanted things to be. Legacy technologies. There are a lot of cool, newer technologies at LocalEdge that have become well entrenched but there are still some legacy systems and they are the biggest time sinks. There are old, home-brewed PHP applications that handle internal business concerns like ticket tracking and time keeping. There are old Java apps that never get decommissioned and are built in pure servlets or pure JSP. They are so coupled to the environment that they only run on production. There is TONS of business logic tied up in Perl and Shell scripts that run via cron jobs and interact directly with databases on various servers. This causes many, many strange bugs that are very hard and time consuming to track down. Effecting change was generally done dragging management along kicking and screaming. Remember above when I said there was a lot of latitude for getting things done? That was sort of true. You could eventually get your way but it could require quite a struggle or, more than likely, doing something on the sly and getting buy-in afterward or hoping that it went unnoticed. And I'm not talking about, "Wah! I want to do it THIS way!" The above-mentioned micromanagement and Expert Beginnerism had strange side-effects. Bizarre technical requirements would be baked into feature requests and user stories. It wouldn't be uncommon to see or hear, "just do this query right in the view" or "here is the SQL we want to use". Before my tenure there were JSPs that queried the db directly and performed all business logic. There were servlets that built HTML and XML for display. To start using patterns like MVC and libraries like Hibernate were a large departure as they flew in the face of such technical requirements. Often times it would go unnoticed but on more than one occasion I'd find myself defending the use of Hibernate because "where's that SQL I gave you?!" Or having to show that, even though the query isn't right next to the HTML it is, indeed, still there. Larger initiatives were also possible and met with greater skepticism. When I started, deploys were handled through a very specific IDE to a very specific container. As you can imagine this coupled the code base intimately to that environment. It also meant every dev had to use the same IDE. We did move to Maven but this took a lot of convincing and a lot of slight-of-hand; we essentially changed the build and deploy process without management knowing. LocalEdge struggles with Agile. They call themselves "Agile" but interpret it as, "we can ask for anything, anytime, at the last minute, without gauging the business value, and it should get done right now without impacting your velocity. And don't provide feedback or suggestions, just do it." MVP is interpreted as, "we need to have Features A-G and deploy Version 1 on the 1st of Month X." Always on the 1st. For some reason. Even if the 1st was a Sunday. There was no concept of, "what is the first thing we can do that can be delivered at the end of this iteration?" Management takes the flexible and "it depends" nature of Agile and twists it into, "we can just do whatever." On more than one occasion something along the lines of an "agile coach" would be brought in and their evaluation was always the same; the programmers seem to get it and do a decent job but management and the business are clueless. If I had to describe the methodology, it takes the tradeoffs of Agile and Waterfall and slams them together. It's lack of planning and forethought but without fast iteration and feedback. When your team got something "done" (based on meager requirements) it would sit, waiting to be looked at, for weeks or months. When it finally got looked at by project stakeholders they would want changes but want you to drop what you working on and take care of them asap. Months of nothing followed by hurry, hurry, hurry. Though my salary was OK it was not on the level of a company looking to become a technical leader in the industry who wanted to seek out and keep software developers to help grow the business. Asking for a raise as small as $5k was a huge deal and an attempt would be made to haggle you down. If you stuck to your guns you could get it to go through begrudgingly and it would take a looooong time. It would also be trotted out and held against you any time you asked for something. Most yearly merit increases were under 1%. At some point they did a profit sharing thing. When the plan was announced my calculations came out to around a $15k bonus if the business met their sales goals for the year. A tidy sum. Signs of a business starting to take themselves seriously. After it was launched there was fine print that made it work out to around $500. The outlook for this company will probably be pretty level as, historically, they find ways to chug along and succeed in spite of themselves. The products are not innovative so there is very little risk, but also, very little chance for big gain. LocalEdge's growth model (at least in 2013) is expanding into new markets. The lack of innovation and quality in the products make this unsustainable. Each of the new markets will eventually level off and decline as competitors and newcomers iterate faster and erode the customer base. But I have little doubt they will survive and find a new way to pivot when that deficit spending catches up. A lot of the reviews here on Glassdoor are, I believe, from people who worked in the many sales departments. I didn't have much interaction with them but it often sounded like hell. I strongly suspect that many of the extremely positive reviews are plants by management. Based on the writing style I could even make a pretty good guess as to who, exactly, the authors are. The fake reviews can be identified by their extremely positive nature, brevity, and lack of specificity; upon reading it's impossible to tell what department the author worked in or what they did. If there's any downside mentioned it's usually "there's some negative people who bring the whole place down" or "the company is moving so fast it's hard to keep up!" or "you really have to be a motivated sales person otherwise it's really tough". It's similar to someone realizing that overt bragging is frowned upon and so changes their tactic to, "Yeah, it was pretty hard but I managed to figure it out." The real shame of it is that the company went out of it's way to squash innovation and creativity. We had an incredible core of people who worked really well together, both on the technical and business side. LocalEdge explicitly halted our efforts at almost every turn because, I guess, they weren't comfortable with it. The tragedy is, had they allowed the teams to self organize and help drive product, they could be enjoying a lot more success. For free. And with increased morale as an added bonus. It might be hard to imagine for some who read this. We had developers knocking down the door, begging to create good UIs and products that would be ahead of the competition, only to be met with, "that's not how we do things. Trust me, I know best." My goal here is to be as transparent as possible. It's best if any candidate knows what they're getting into. I gave 2 stars because LocalEdge has some redeeming qualities. It's a great place to get your career started and on a time scale of around 6 months you probably won't notice a lot of these negative attributes. 6 months to 1 year would be completely tolerable, depending on your disposition. And if there's still some of the great people left I used to work with then you're in for a real treat. You will learn a lot. When you go in for your interview don't be afraid to ask any of the questions that you have.