Extremely Chaotic and Overly Difficult to make changes amid mass layoffs. - Programmer Analyst Technician CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield Employee Review

* Manpower shortages. There are an immense lack of resources available at the company. I will have to regularly login on my PTO days to make sure key processes don't error out because no one else is available to resolve these issues. I have to believe that upper management has heard of these issues, but has yet to do anything to resolve them. * Archaic work flows. In my time at CareFirst I've encountered manual processes that associates have been performing that are absolutely horrifying. One associate in particular would spend half of their day filtering out text files by mass importing the files into excel. It was satisfying to automate, but it's a scary thought that that process is probably just the tip of the iceberg. * IT is a mess. Outside of getting service accounts setup it's been a struggle to get anything done when they are involved. I don't know what the source of this problem is, but it has certainly had a negative impact on the company and nothing has changed in the past 3 years. * Resistance to change. As a programmer my primary role was to implement new processes that converted manual work to an automated flow. Getting EXTREMELY simple changes in place to support my processes were ridiculously hard to make happen. Many times I had to get my department head involved on email changes for things as simple as having excel files placed in a folder instead of being emailed. * Huge turnover. The 5 people who were involved in my hiring at the company are now all gone. This crosses over between HR, my area, and Upper Management. * Massive layoffs without any kind of warning have been going on all year. The last round I experienced at CF included my department head. When we asked why we weren't told we found out that Upper management had asked the person over him to "not speak about it". This was a huge contributing factor to me resigning from the company. During the last two rounds managers were not told of those under them who had been laid off, and had to find out via text messages from the laid off associates. * Drowning in High Priority Projects. One of the most frustrating thing I've encountered at CareFirst are the constant high priority projects that are given to my area with insane due dates without any heads up. Typically this is because Sales will promise certain things to clients without ever communicating to the business area to confirm that the processes are in place and ready for the clients.