Pros
The way Clearwater conducts technical interviews leads to them hiring very smart and competent developers who make for great coworkers. The best part of my experience there was always the people around me. Investment accounting is a very intricate and intriguing space to work in, and you will never be bored with it. If you enjoy a tech culture feel, you'll find it in abundance if you're working in Boise. Its location in downtown Boise is a huge plus because of the synergies it has for transportation: It's built right on top of Boise' main bus depot, you can use a complementary bike garage, and its only four or five blocks away from the greenbelt.
Cons
Welson, Carson, Anderson, and Stowe purchased a majority share in Clearwater during 2016, and really started to push for an IPO in mid-2018. In tandem came a complete swap of company leadership. The employee experience has steadily degraded ever since. In an effort to get to the aforementioned IPO, Clearwater became overly bureaucratic. Any type of insight employees may have over the products they own or work with will be stymied because your team and division leads don’t have any actual power to direct the companies efforts. In that sense, the leadership is very disconnected from those in the trenches. Clearwater is winning sales and new clients across the globe, but they haven't paired that sales success with well-executed initiatives to increase head count and scale their platform. The operational burden on the entirety of the organization for the past two to three years has pushed many employees to the brink and it doesn't leave time for them to be innovative, rested, healthy employees; rather, they're always fighting the latest fire or struggling to get the latest promised deliverable out the door. Employees are constantly requesting additional headcount to combat this, but the employee attrition rate makes it near impossible. For example, there was a big push to add a headcount of ~120 employees to their implementations division over six months (internally called Global Delivery), and the attrition within that time frame negated the effort, leaving the day to day unchanged for just about everyone. No relief, no improvements. The past three years in Boise has been a time of unprecedented rises in living costs and the company’s HR (who keeps an iron fist around compensation) absolutely refused to respond at all. The salary of an entry level software engineer without another job offer’s leverage remains the same as it was in 2017 before the rise. It’s apparent to everyone that the biggest way to stop employee dissatisfaction is to raise salaries, but leadership refuses to confront this reality: Instead, they ask the employees to be more passionate about the work and promise them career development in return. In contrast, career development at Clearwater, vertically or horizontally, is abysmally slow and nowhere near fast enough for how fast people can personally develop their skills and ability. It's quietly acknowledged in one-on-one meetings between managers and employees that the best way to get the compensation you deserve is to jump ship and come back some time later, if at all. Execs seem to think that giving employees equity is adequate to stop the tide of compensation dissatisfaction, but when your bimonthly paycheck isn’t putting enough dollars in your pocket to provide a reasonable standard of living, no amount of equity can fix it. From a development perspective, the company needs more SREs, and this is a serious point of bottleneck for their development efforts. Clearwater struggles to get away from the prototypical Java+Maven+Apache stack because SREs have no time to prioritize making development feasible and comfortable in other languages such as Python, Javascript, or Go. If your team decides it wants to use a different technology, you'll be left to invent the wheel. I have heard from several managers in development that the reason they struggle to hire is because HR refuses to compete with the new normal of remote salaries and seems to think they should get pre-2018 Boise prices for development talent. The consequence is that there is very little reason for potential hires to come to Clearwater, and they don't. The attempts to establish culture at Clearwater have been detestable. Their best effort was an email campaign by top execs where each pontificated on a quality they wanted the company to have. Many have jokingly referred to it as "propaganda" even in front of their managers and their managers' managers without repercussion because everyone that wasn't an exec felt that it was a fitting term. The potential for a great work culture is there, but until they can reduce the actual employee load and get leadership that knows how to create it, the environment at Clearwater will feel sterile and void of it. There is the makings of a really great company within Clearwater, but regardless, the employee experience has suffered tremendously in the past three years due to disconnected and incapable leadership. The success of its product masks that fact to the board and stakeholders, so I'd steer clear until they clean house, whenever that may be.
