Pros
* Of all the companies I've worked for till date, GlobalLogic has the most open culture. The culture allows for freedom of expression.
* They really follow the open door policy in practice. You are free to pick up the phone and talk to any one even in the senior management, or approach them in person, and you are guaranteed that you will be heard and taken seriously. And there will be no negative repercussions. On the contrary, the senior management strongly encourages freedom of expression and they make themselves completely available to everyone within the company. Peter C.J Harrison, the CEO of GlobalLogic, is an exemplary leader. He has a pleasing personality, a good sense of humor, excellent communication skills and he is a very hard working person. He confers no special favors upon himself and treats himself just as any other employee of the company. He is constantly striving to make himself available to people in the company for an open dialogue. He and the other members of the senior management have it on their schedule to travel to all the centers of the company on a regular basis to conduct one-on-one and town-hall sessions on a regular basis. And you might read all of this and think this is a sycophant exaggerating some cliche behavior. That is not so, however. I've worked for a number of companies in the last 13 years and have not come across such an open and honest behavior from the CEO of a company.
* There are no stupid policies such as the dress code, or that you're not allowed to listen to music while working, etc. On the contrary, the company promotes a fun-filled environment. There is a very spacious sports area for both in-door and out-door games, there's a health and fitness club in the premises with a paid instructor, there are yoga classes, a doctor in the facility and even a sleeping room where you can take a nap if you are tired. Employees listen to songs while working. You can even play badminton or any sport during work hours if your workload can afford the hiatus.
* The intranet of the company is made full use of. It provides an active platform to discuss issues. This lends the employees a sense of democracy. There's a very active forum for discussing a wide range of topics from the feedback on food or a particular policy to technical topics. The management takes note and responds.
* You can maintain a work life balance.
* The senior management is responsive of the concerns of the employees. You can't have what you want always, but most of the times, the scales are tilted in favor of reason.
* The company allows you to choose your working hours. It really practices the idea of giving employees a flexible work timing that suits their personal lives.
* One can never make generalizations and be accurate, but in general, the quality of developers in the company is better than the levels in other companies I've worked for, in the NCR region. That said, there's a fair share of idiots, and no one is to blame for that. All companies hire from the society at large. Therefore, the workforce of a company is a sample of the census of the society we live in. The composition of the society is a majority of mediocrity. Every company, therefore, has a majority of mediocrity. But in comparison, the quality of some of the thinking minds in this company is on the side above average.
* Whatever others think, I get very positive vibes from the few members in the senior management that I've had the chance of interacting with. Peter Harrison, out of all, is a good leader and when he speaks, you don't hear a CEO speak. Instead, it is one human being talking to another. Those are the vibes you get. When he addresses an audience, you get a sense of his honesty and straight-forwardness. The same can be said of the current CTO Jim Walsh, who is also very down-to-earth and a very capable, committed and honest man.
* All the members in the senior management are very hard-working, and that comes across when you meet them, speak to them, and their work impacts you at some level.
The list doesn't end here. I'm missing some points but the ones I am missing are ramifications of the democractic culture of the company.
Cons
The most annoying thing, and perhaps the only one, is that there's a layer of middle management that is not very technology savvy. And I'm being polite in my description of a specimen of this layer.
This layer, and perhaps this is true of every organization in this business, is inexperienced about the dynamics of software development, and this, in my humble opinion, is one factor that poses a barrier for this organization to take a leap to the next level. While policies are formulated by the senior management with the most noble of intent, the sad thing is that the execution is still in the hands of the middle management, and this provides an orifice for the "leak of the intent." When an initiative makes its way from one stratum of the organization to the other, its intent is almost always diluted, and so is the effectiveness of the decisions that manifest the idea. We cannot expect growth when an army of bad people execute the plans of a few good people.
This is also the reason that software is expensive, more expensive than it ought to be. The layer that doesn't add value to the software development process has a cost and that cost gets factored into the profit and loss account. And here, I am referring to software produced by 'services' organizations, not by companies like Yahoo! or Google or Microsoft or 37Signals or FogCreek that actually develop real products.
