Toxicity and Hostility in Corporate IT
Pros
During my time at the company, growth and returns were steady. Lee Bird is always able to make the shareholders happy, and knows how to run a business. The employee benefits were decent. The people in the trenches are good folks, and will do anything in their power to help you.
Cons
There is an incredible lack of communication between the different business units. The culture is very reactive and stressful, with very little direction. I worked in Information Technology building their infrastructure. Often, employees would be retasked from major projects to address the "flavor of the hour" issues, and there would be a complete lack of understanding regarding why the projects just weren't getting done. Micromanagement is the norm, directors don't trust the employees they hire, and directors tend to slam their fists on tables and throw literal fits, yelling at direct or indirect reports publically or in meetings, and become aggressive and vindictive towards employees when they disagree with the way forward. This never happened to me personally, but I witnessed it happening to others on numerous occasions - even to managers. The generally unprofessional behavior was amplified when a new CIO joined the company, presumably due to stress. HR has been notified on several occasions, both predating and postdating my employment, about problems and have not done anything to address those issues. Legitimate issues are being actively hidden from C-Level management in an effort to trick C-Level management into thinking that they have an effective and professional senior management team. In reality, at least in IT, they're basically all the boss from the Dilbert cartoons with a few key exceptions. In infrastructure IT at least, there is no investment into their employees. Director level management creates roadblocks and changes deliverables and requirements constantly to make it more difficult for employees to go to industry conferences or get training. Training budget is first-come first-serve, and in my experience the infrastructure group gets last pick which leaves no budget left after application development schedules their training. The requirements for submitting for training or conference money changes between departments, which feels a lot like favoritism. I could go on for days here, but what you see above were the main reasons for my departure. The bottom line is, don't work here until their management layer is fixed. It's not worth the headache.
