If you are a technical person in the US, you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. 3Pillar is nothing more than an outsourcing development workshop. The US technical team is very small (think under 10) and there is no vision/plan for how to use them. You will hear many great things about US Engineering like “Seal Team”, or “We do the hard problems — easy ones go overseas”. Do not fall for their trap. Once you are there, you will be told many times over how you are a very expensive resource and they have to get to profit as fast as possible so your job is to move projects offshore as fast as you can. In practice, this just doesn’t happen…you will be working with offshore teams doing early meetings with them and trying to help them along. The best part is, the offshore team wants nothing to do with you. They will have engineering meetings and make crucial decisions while you are sleeping because they don’t want your advice. They will make some really junior mistakes (like not knowing how to deal with timezones in code or including multiple front-end css libraries and then use both everywhere). Your time will be spent fighting these battles and fixing these mistakes so you aren’t embarrassed when talking to the customer. The customer’s get angry and will call the team out publicly when a bug happens that shouldn’t have and frankly, the customer is right. I was embarrassed being in front of the customer countless times explaining how we could make this type of mistake.
If you aren’t working with an offshore team, then you are most likely working by yourself on a project so easy that an intern could do it. They hired an architect and then put him on a project where he had to write sql queries to make some graphs (he quit 2 weeks after being hired — shocker). Or you will be migrating someone else’s code to AWS or you will be making a web front-end backed by Google Docs that outputs graphs for a sales team. The customer feedback will be “make the graph more bumpy” and so you will be changing a Google Spreadsheet so the data fits what the sales team wants. The most “interesting” option that you can do is a standard web app, probably written in React with a Mongo back-end. It will most likely be a CRUD web app that everyone has done a million times. You will hear about how exciting the projects “in the pipeline” are, but in reality they are not exciting. Digitizing a trucking company’s records is not exciting work for a dev…it may be exciting and groundbreaking in the trucking industry, but there is not much excitement for a skilled US developer. In reality, 3PG will take any work a customer has that will pay for US resources — even if it is the most boring, mundane work.
Lastly, upper management attempts to be your friend and often spins it that they have your best interest. You will be promised a promotion or a bonus and then come review time, you will be told there is no budget for promotions/bonus. Multiple devs have attempted to quit to go work directly for the client (because working 60+ hour weeks for 3PG does you no good — at least if you worked for the client, you’d get some credit or ownership in it). This attempt to quit starts with a friendly “yea, we will support you in this” and may even go as far as management announcing you are leaving for this new opportunity. Then you will be blindsided about “breach of contract” with your NDA and will be told you can’t do it. This is embarrassing, especially when it was announced to everyone already. The upper management is all over the place and has no clue how to run or handle US Engineers. Every week will be a new story of “we are dropping your contract”, “we are keeping the contract”, “we have awesome work in the pipeline”, “we have nothing in the pipeline”…it is maddening and doesn’t give us any confidence that things are working smoothly.
So in summary, you will be hired for a very exciting role in doing groundbreaking projects that are hard and innovative. You may be hired as a .NET developer or an iOS developer, but in reality you will do any project that the customer is willing to pay for a US resource. If that is managing a devops pipeline or Jira training, then that is what you will do. 3PG will take any work that is paid, it is a pure staff aug culture and they have no core competencies.
