If you are considering moving to the Provo office for engineering, DON'T
Pros
- Many learning opportunities and ownership of your projects - Catered lunches (albeit in the Provo office the foods crap anyways - not anything special and extremely high in sodium. Snacks are also sub-par; everything's in a package / not fresh, and the soda machine routinely breaks) - Decent outings (though, truthfully our engineering ski trips is not inclusive of everyone)
Cons
Let me just first make it clear: if you are considering moving to Provo, UT to work as an engineer, absolutely DO NOT do this, especially if you're in your 20s and about to graduate university. 1. Inaccurate performance metrics. The company values how long you've been here more than your actual contributions. The skill variance is absurd; I can think of so many L4+ engineers whom I outperform in knowledge and contributions and it's crazy how much they're getting paid to do mediocre work. So many L3s are definitely deserving promotions and conversely so many L4+s should be fired quite frankly. 2. Low skill variance in the Provo office: this comes naturally since the office recruits so heavily from BYU. Makes sense, since no one in their right mind would ever choose to voluntarily drop everything to move here. 3. Low technical skill in general: Again, no senior developer would deliberately drop move to Utah county to babysit a bunch of crap L3s. This has led to an overabundance of junior developers who commit crap code and something's always broken all the time. Because of this, when the company does hire any senior developer into the Provo office, chances are the expectation is much lower than at other companies. 4. Disorganization / Bad PMs: At least with the team that I'm working on, if you are looking for Agile Development, do not come working at Qualtrics. Everything feels like a hackathon project (most likely because my team's been tainted by ES (engineering service, btw, don't let them sell this to you). There is no so-called "method to the madness"; it's quite literally just madness; we don't do scrum correctly and dates and deadlines are just thrown around randomly. Many times my manager has told other teams we have a solution to a problem - when in fact, we certainly do not. 5. Social: At the end of the day, we come into the office because it is our job; this is true. Still, I look at many of my college peers who are working at their companies and I envy how social they get to be with their coworkers who are their age and who are also new grads. If you're looking for this vibe, you will most likely not find it in the Provo office. Quite literally everyone who's a recent college grad is also already married, so they have a family to come home to after work. It can get really annoying whenever you have team lunches, and someone's "mission" gets brought up; I guarantee, this happens more than you probably would want it to.