Pros
I worked at a portal in the south for three years. It started off pretty promising: Great benefits, small agency feel with a larger company backing, the opportunity to work on some high-visibility projects. Having millions of people see your work, and win awards for this work, is pretty amazing. Some of the folks in the company, particularly on the tech/design side, are awesome and talented.
Cons
- No real training opportunities other than the yearly conferences, which are really just excuses for the directors and vps to get drunk on the company dime. - Mgt is constantly trying to mine the ideas for new initiatives from employees but then take credit for them. - the operations staff is a joke. Read the other reviews here-the incompetence in endemic throughout NIC and the state portals. Kids with no experience in management or technology are promoted way too quickly to high level positions and they have no idea what they are doing. The VPs look for big talkers with short skirts and swarmy smiles to promote. It is hard to go to work everyday and work your butt off when the people running each portal have less combined experience than you do, and it shows. - if a low level nobody who works for a state agency doesn't like you for any reason, you will be fired-the company does not support their employees and will get rid of anybody. This is no joke, look at a state employee that we have a project with wrong, you will be fired. - the Operations mgt staff are only it in for bonuses. They demand employees work overtime to make some arbitrary deadline while they sit on a beach somewhere and consider themselves working because they looked at their phone sometime on their vacation. - the people who do the real work-the devs and designers treated like dirt across the board. A few get lifted up into management positions, but they are generally very young and very "yes maam!" folks. Unless you are willing to eat dirt everyday and work unlimited overtime, you will not move up in the dev/designer roles. - the project managers across the board in the company are completely worthless-they have no idea what they are talking about, how to articulate anything to do with technology, how to manage projects-nothing. I spent too much of my time filling in the gaps of the PMs I worked with-you cant just hire friendly people who look cute and expect them to be good at everything. - senior exec mgt are non-technical, pure soft skills people. It is insane that a technology company is run by people who can barely use their phones.These people expect the portals to have double digit growth every year, which is pretty near impossible. The stress of all that is on the backs of the dev/designers, and the GMs and Vps and Execs reap all of the awards. - and on the subject of awards... what nonsense. The portals are all obsessed with winning the Best of the Web every year, which is a purely made up nonesense award that is only won by states that fly the award leadership in and wine and dine them. Everyone in the company knows these awards are nonsense yet they force the portals to redesign every year, perfectly good sites are dismantled year after year, just to try to win more awards. This company likes to pretend that they have user experience experts on board, but they do not. Changing the UX of a state site year after year, not for the advantage of users but to try to impress a small group of people who dole out awards, is anti-UX behavior.
