Pros
Old company, but very profitable. Very infrequently lays off IT staff (and then, in 2008, only to 'match' furlowing being done on non-productive branch/broker staff sitting in front of non-ringing phones). Well-funded IT shop. Invest in good tech choices (though pressured to cut corners and save pennies). Pay well. Reasonably flexible (a little too flexible in lax security policies around VIP-mandated holes). Solid IT culture.
Cons
CHR overall has a wild west culture. Branch managers are 'kings'. If a branch manager 'wants' it, it gets done, whether good supportable policy or not. No centralized control and little standardization of IT policies across branches. Situational policy determination is the norm. Strong cultural aversion to saying 'no' to any request, even if risky policy. Most IT working-environment issues can be traced to 2008, when the Service Delivery group ("help desk") went deep on ITIL (but only symbolically). At that time they fundamentally cleared their management and brought in new. SD has own Director reporting to CIO. Impacts created by their policies aren't 'their problem'. A substantial portion of efforts since that time have effectively been getting their helpdesk out of the 'help' business, and shifting the bulk of end-user contact into second and third level IT staff (in another Director chain). Since that time SD has been largely focused on turning their desk into a "voice menu"-style call-routing system. 'Minimum-time-to-resolution', and 'first-call-resolution' are not emphasized, as long as they can churn tickets by bouncing calls and workload into other departments, and then refuse reassignment of tickets from infrastructure back to the helpdesk. Shifting the workload from the helpdesk to the infrastructure staff has created an environment where core system maintenance needs to be deferred around the mandate to perform end-to-end service from second and third tier on end-user tickets. This creates unnecessary outage risk to the business. Also a flat IT org and refusal to differentiate staff rank through tiered titles means that there is no room for IT staff advancement and realization (beyond silently in terms of pay). The only means to advance is either a shift into "management", or by throwing away hard-won skills and knowledge and starting over in another infrastructure group on a new set of applications.
