Pros
Not many positives for internal IT Professionals at this time based on churn and chaos. They are having a hiring boom (despite many employees being unhappy and finding other opportunities and an apparent revolving door being present). The building, which includes a cafeteria and gym, is nice and encourages work-life balance if you can manage the long work hours.
Cons
As much as Oncourse Home Solutions (OHS) advertises their brand as data-driven and their internal employee values as SUPER (meaning: successful, unified, progressive, empathetic, reliable), this really is not true in any area of the business as it concerns Finance reporting or IT. At best, they are data-aware with an early 2000s open-source tech stack with almost no data governance available. I really wanted OHS IT and Finance teams to succeed, however, sadly, there is a lack of Cloud and ELT expertise, and C-level executives are resistant to change and oftentimes micromanage their directors and senior managers to control every aspect of infrastructure and development work revolving around Oracle EBS and Snowflake. The culture is very tribal in terms of teams owning their technology and processes, and rarely is their good cross-functional team collaboration and communication during my time spent at OHS. Lack of understanding around data engineering has made the company less successful with their reporting and analytical platforms and delivering data. As an example, they recently purchased Oracle Active Data Guard for one-way synchronous replication and load of their key operational data from Oracle EBS onto a centralized reporting server VM that to then fed into Snowflake for Analytics. However, despite numerous conversations and pushbacks by me and my colleagues and my team members, there was no POC, and no testing done on this new product in our loading pipelines resulting in downtime and data not being available for several days. In addition to this, senior management was not aware that only about .1% of the data was being ingested daily. The product was purchased for a substantial amount without addressing the needs of all IT teams while only helping the Oracle Support team during off-hours. Executives, and VPs do not acknowledge any criticism or feedback from other leaders on issues present. I felt undermined on calls with leadership and none of my recommendations were taken into account. Work-life is a headache due to the unorganized chaos between data governance projects, data expansion projects, security fixes, and Production fixes. Burn-out is common. HR does not support employees but is only subservient to the executives and their wishes.
