Pros
Many talented and innovative individuals that formerly worked here. Majority of folks you engage with at a peer-level go above and beyond their duties and pay-grade. Quite literally. You will learn a lot here about how a broken company works, this will set you up for success in the future because you will have this learnings and know what to avoid.
Cons
Those in most of the non-technical roles that hold leadership roles and are influential in the company are not in those positions due to talent, nor are they placed there strategically. The majority of folks in leadership roles here are there purely based on tenure alone and do no work themselves. Everything is delegated to others and there is no collaboration. Extreme old school mentality, very much a uniform leadership from a demographic perspective. Many of those that were diverse, in all levels of the company, left. Any new initiatives around diversity or the tiny changes in employee investment are more so a Marketing ploy than actual attempt at shifting the culture. Those in leadership roles are not aware of today’s society and the importance of trainings and programs around diversity and inclusion. They’ve only started to invest in such matters with their new cohort of employees because they failed to recognize the deep-rooted issues the organization has and in turn lost all their employees who would have contributed to such programs. DataBank has intentionally worked with Glassdoor to remove all reviews that depicted explicit details about the company’s culture, policies, and lack thereof. All former reviews can no longer be found. This was their solution. There have been many encounters by my peers and myself when it came to discrimination around race and age. Comments by managers to employees about how they look, and how old they are. Insensitive behavior and inappropriate conversations about appropriating culture took place as well. In addition, most employees here are underpaid and paid well under the median salary for these roles. There is a lack of a bonus structure as well. Hard work is recognized with a kudos on slack if you’re lucky and they care enough. Even that is rare. I would not be surprised if there was pay discrimination as well. For a company that’s been around for 40 years, the processes are either broken or non-existent. There’s heavy resistance to change here. Mostly due to people not wanting to do more or unfamiliar work and have lower level folks run everything. High expectations, low reward, no work life balance. Benefit of working remote is not having to deal with in-person office politics. Con is now your work lives with you at home, you have no choice but to perform because no one else will do it and your livelihood depends on it. Last year we were able to hire 135 people but no one mentioned the hundreds of people who got furloughed or fired and the multiple facilities we shut down.