Pros
Generally speaking, the colleagues are decent people. I don't really blame them for the problems I had, but mostly towards to working culture and upper manager. Okay benefits, although base minimum for the country I am working.
Cons
- I felt misled on the job application. It described the role as requiring technical skills in various programming languages, and thought this would be good to further my skills. In actuality, I hardly use those and I am worried that I tanked my IT career by choosing this role. - Very poor quality legacy, closed source, licensed tools to work with. If you studied IT in university, you just took a time portal two decades back. As a result, the software we maintain does not feel secure, fails constantly and we do not follow modern develop principles, forcing to do lots of manual work vs working in a programmatic, smart way. - Extending the above point, when you voice your opinion you people become defensive, that this is how it's done in the real world, coming from people who never worked an IT job before. It's a bit shocking how so many people have "Cloud...." whatever in their job title, but they don't know anything about networking, cloud computing concepts or software development. It's one bad design / development practice initiated by uneducated people to fix the previous one, rinse repeat. - Very cliquey working environment, with the "cool people" having their own circles, that will make you feel like an outsider for having different opinions. As a result, you are made to feel anti social and negative by your manager and team at least once a week. - Management pushes more and more work on us, with very high expectations, although our pay is bottom of the barrel for the industry. When we start to feel stressed out, management tells us what we want to hear that "oh, we will raise this" but nothing happens. Mixed signals for encouraging work life balance, while expecting us to work intensely the whole day, and at the same time expecting us to attend social things during work hours. - Guidance and training is almost non existent, and blame is constantly put on us when something goes wrong, but there is no credit given when we stress over very complex tasks and figure things out. We are reminded to "ask questions" when we don't know, but if we don't know what we are doing is wrong - how would we know to ask or not? When you learn IT in a certain way in University, everything in this role is counter intuitive to that, and it's incredibly easy to make a mistake because of the huge amount of manual work. In a nutshell, its a very narrow minded environment to work in with really bad software and really backwards working practices. I really hope to leave this role soon. Thanks to my manager and some team mates for trying to be nice to me.