Salary is far below market value making Atos Origin not even close to being competitive. Benefits are poor and expensive for what is offered. Raises rarely occur (once every 3 or more years) and at embarrassing levels (3% of an already ridiculously low salary).
Time off (vacation and holidays) is uncommonly low. Ten holidays per year, 2 personal days and two weeks until the employee has reached their 4th year of employment. Only until recently were IS professionals hired directly as Atos employees. It was not unusual to contract the IS professional (at a very low rate of pay) with no holiday, vacation or sick pay for as much as a year and a half. Thus reaching a 3rd week of vacation would only occur after 5.5 years of supporting the contract.
There are no opportunities for advancement, training or certification. In fact, in some cases training and certification are highly discouraged out of fear that the employee will better himself and find a better job elsewhere. Any training must be done at the expense of the IS professional and time off must be taken out of vacation time.
On-call is expected but not compensated with either monetary reward nor time off. Any time spent supporting the contracted customer is expected to be free work by the employee on the employee's personal time.
Intimidation is employed as the management style of upper management. Attempts to micro-manage the employees is common but with the hectic schedule of the team leads (nearly constant meetings) the micro-management comes only in waves.
Atos upper management does not understand the technology which leads to a failure at managing Server Admins and engineers. A fast food establishment style of management is employed rather than fostering an atmosphere of trust and encouragement. Sadly, the last technology knowledgeable manager at the upper level recently left the company and a vacuum in communication of the technology to upper management has resulted.
Upper management and some team leads lack true management experience and skills. A manager must be strong enough to stand as a barrier between the negativity of the contracted customer leadership team and the staff. The manager should also learn when it is correct to say "no" to the contracted customer leadership when appropriate or postpone an answer until consultation with the IS professionals can be obtained. Atos management is full of "yes men" who are too quick to toss the IS professionals under the proverbial bus to save their own skin and erroneously place blame on the IS professionals below them when nescient promises fail to be delivered to the contracted customer.
The company is very short sighted and does not invest in it's resources (skilled IS professionals). There is no future for the Austin/Seton contract because of the decision by Atos corporate management's decision to milk the contract without investing in the staff. Atos Origin is considered a regressive company.
Reporting incidents can come from top down through an escalation rather than from the established process of reporting the incident to the Service Desk. The escalation by Seton leadership encourages Seton employees to skirt the established reporting processes which make supporting the environment inefficient and chaotic.
As a result there is a culture of impermanence. Moral is very low and turn over is high. Recent events, and the increasing gap between market value and current staff salary, has pushed even long timers to jump ship to better opportunities. New employees, after tasting the lash, have put their resumes back up on Dice and spend their off time searching for new positions elsewhere. When staff members leave to new jobs, their coworkers are happy for them as if they have been released from bondage.
