Pros
- Great people on lots of different teams that are very easy to work with! - Team dynamics are mostly pretty good and everyone generally works well together - Lots of focus on the Give Back initiative, which involves volunteering for lots of different local organizations that focus on providing for the underserved populations in the area - Lots of different products to work on
Cons
- The first and largest con is that while they say they value employee development, this is mostly not true. They do value your development but it would appear that it's only important if you stay on the same team. We have been told they want people to move around between teams, but this almost never happens. Why you may ask? Because HR / Finance utilizes a grade / wage suppression method of looking at career paths and when those imaginary lines that they create in terms of salary, experience, etc. don't line up, they will not allow that employee to move to a different team. - Because of the aforementioned, good people are leaving in droves or being poached by other companies who offer a more competitive salary and much better chances for advancement / raises - The culture has changed several times over the years depending on the leaders put in charge of the groups. For a while, all products were siloed. Then with a management turnover, teams were able to start working together very easily. With yet another management turnover, the silos have returned and working with other teams or even knowing what they do has become next to impossible again. - Layoffs have included people with lots of institutional knowledge and management expects the other less qualified folks to pick up the slack even when they already have a full workload - Not enough people allocated for the amount of work that has come along in the last couple of years. Teams are stretched very thin, with very tight timelines to get things done. - Promotions are non-existent for the most part. Also, with much of the work outsourced to the teams in India, there is a huge difference in terms of title vs. actual work experience between here and there. In other words, someone with 10 years of experience here could be a Sr. something. In India, someone with less than 5 years experience could be an Expert or Principal something (the next two levels up from a Sr. position). - Pay raises also make no sense here, as there a people who are great employees who have been there a while, yet they are not paid like that. Others are hired at a much higher rate than the folks who have been there a long while and have a LOT of institutional knowledge / experience. - Applying for a job internally is somewhat normal. There will sometimes be an informal conversation with the manager, maybe an interview or two and then communications will cease. No word at all from the manager either because the position has since been frozen, they moved on with someone else or you've hit the HR / Finance artificial blockade mentioned in the first con. Good luck trying to figure out what happened unless you know people who might be able to find out! - Way behind when it comes to Cloud technology. Just now starting to move several major systems over when a lot of other companies started doing this a year or two ago. - Projects will be funded, lots of work is done and then the project is scrapped for any number of reasons. This happens a lot more here than at other companies from what has been seen.