Ventajas
Very few companies can strike a balance of professionalism and the "fun, exciting" environment without failing to reach those targets, or flat out failing as a company. From day one, I felt like a critical team member and the fears of being too playful that come with new jobs were quickly diminished. WebFirst is extremely respectful of your time and personal needs. When we had our first child, I remember having to bring my laptop with me to the hospital, and when we were having our second, I was reprimanded for staying home to care for my wife during a very bad case of morning sickness and food poisoning; WebFirst would never expect you to put them before family and at times will even push you to spend as much time as possible with family when the need arises. WebFirst strives not to be a vendor for their clients, but a partner. If I ever have a concern, I can safely bring anything up to the team and with a VERY constant line of communication with their clients, I never have to worry about the project managers refusing to discuss a concern directly with clients - an issue I had in the past which could often add as much as 6 weeks of additional unnecessary work. It feels good working for a company not looking to bleed as much money out of clients as possible. While many of the contracts are inherited, the team takes immense pride in the 100% in-house work done, and these projects tend to be exceptionally clean with very well written and concise code.
Desventajas
WebFirst has projects that are well below ideal in quality, all of which come from acquiring contracts from other vendors and support contracts where extremely tight deadlines come in to fix issues in a few weeks time. A good portion of these projects will have everyone - including WebFirst's very talented and experienced developers - scratching their heads about what they're even looking at (some, even the client has no clue what the product they paid for even is.) This appears to be very common with government contracts, which WebFirst primarily focuses on. It would be nice to see more non-government and new work contracts come in to help balance the load. WebFirst still operates largely like a startup, with many of the tools being developed in-house, but there is a massive initiative to modernize all processes across the board that has made things run much smoother, and the returns of these initiatives has quickly paid off but given how recent these initiatives were put in place, there's still a long road ahead before everything is running as smooth as it can be.