Pluspunten
As a current employee, I started as a developer and have worked at this company for many years, and managed to get my success and achievements with many others' support along the way. I'd like to share my experience here so that people who like what I like and can enjoy what I enjoy in technology field could gain some useful information from my post and come join the fun or make a difference. I joined this company initially because of its parent company j2 Global's great speed of growth and stability. A secure and stable job was my No1 priority at that time and j2 did not disappoint me as their stock price has grown from 20 USD to 80 USD since then. And FuseMail (which is a name adopted from an acquired company)'s own revenue has also grown at least 10 times (now a significant part of j2) and our development team has grown 5 times larger. I am proud to say that I am part of the team who made this difference. j2 is big enough to provide stability and job security, but FuseMail team is small enough for me to experience the whole spectrum of our technology. I started with Java and PHP, but over the years I've used many other different languages, framework, and tools depending on what's most suited for the tasks at hand, like JavaScript, Python, Go, Bash, Perl, C, C#, .Net and even more. There is at least one big project with each language and multiple frameworks or tools were prototyped or used with it. For a developer like me, this is lots of fun and learning. Unlike many other email security service providers for small businesses on the market, this company has its own technology. We have some very smart people leading the way in terms of what technology is the best for us and how to be efficient and profitable as well. At the mean time, there's also a very free and open environment for others to contribute their ideas as well. You can make a difference as long as you are willing to. As an email company with a non-stop increasing customer base, our data grows bigger and bigger day by day. So yes, we are in the hot and interesting business of big data processing as well! There are plenty of data and servers for someone like me to attempt to analyze and experiment on. Every day there could be a new discovery and a great sense of achievement if a spam/virus or other pattern was successfully recognized, defined and implemented. Due to the challenging data size, it also made the UI/API work much more interesting. Now you have to think about regionalization, performance gain/loss, search and browse speed, caching vs database etc. Along the way, I discovered many advanced features that modern technology has offered us to handle big data and high availability requirements. And to actually have a real life situation to use these technologies is a very exciting thing for me. Since the company is still growing with j2's ambition to take over a lion share of the small business market, I can see plenty of opportunities here in terms of new technology exploration and development. I felt like working in a small Google company where people have less ego and there is much more future to build and create by yourself. And on top of that, my boss has provided me with lots of freedom to work on the projects that I am interested in and work in the way that I like. This freedom to me is priceless. I have worked at other companies before and have always gone up to the top of the group previously. Still, often I would feel bored doing the same thing every day and not wanting to go to work some times. But with the variety of projects and daily challenges here, it made me wake up in the morning and want to go to work to solve all these mysteries and problems, or create something new. Work is a big part of our lives, having fun in it is very important to me. That's what made me stay all these years and I would look forward to new challenges going forward!
Minpunten
Not a single company is perfect, if there's a strength, there's usually a weakness. j2's motto as I'm aware of has been "may the best get the most" in terms of money. Depends on which party you belong to, this motto could be loved or hated by you. Because the money is only so much, if someone gets the big share, then there must be someone else who doesn't get them. Hence you see some negative reviews here from people who were bitter from this evaluation system. But the fact that the company is still standing and growing and being one of the most profitable businesses in the field, sort of proved that this motto works for the greater picture. Also, evaluation is done by people, rarely you'll see someone who loves technology would also love to talk to people. However, lack of communication doesn't mean lack of good intention. Hence there has been a round of many development managers with the intention to take good care of people as much as possible under j2's guideline. I am not the type that would cling to my managers by myself, but I do find changing of the managers could affect team spirit from time to time. It always takes a while for the new manager and new team to get to know each other and some people could feel threatened or develop misunderstanding with the management easily. But despite the management changes, from what I have seen, the company has been very sensitive and consistent when dealing with people's departure. Some times there may be misunderstandings, but the truth is that, for people who have passed their probation period and worked here for a while, when the time comes for them to go, they were always given plenty of time or chances to either improve or find another job. I was sorry to see from some of the reviews above that some of them weren't aware of the good wills that were given to them. But I am also glad or hope that they find a more suitable job for themselves.