Pros
I've been at Charter/Spectrum about 7 years. It was my first software development job. I started as a contractor and then converted to FTE after about a year and a half. I got lucky since very few contractors ever get converted. I just happened to have a manger I didn't even report to hear good things about me and decide he wanted me on his team shortly after my previous manager (who told me I would never get converted) left the company. The only open position they had was for a senior developer, so I became a senior frontend dev with less than 2 years experience and grew into the role after that. I've learned a ton and it's been a great place to start my career. However recently things have been going down hill and have me looking for new opportunities. Pros: - Everyone below middle-manager I have worked with has been very nice and generally competent. - My direct managers have been excellent and did a good job keeping our team insulated from corporate politics. - Competitive pay and good benefits (except vacation). 401k match, company pays part of healthcare premiums to keep them roughly the same each year, company contributions to HSA. - Generous bonuses (10%+ per year). - Good work/life balance. Almost never have had to work overtime. - Easy to make $140k+ as a senior dev while not having to work super hard. - Moving to newer tech stacks on more recent projects. Free access to Pluralsight for training. - Interesting technical challenges working on various video platforms.
Cons
- Extremely corporate, with endless bureaucracy and corporate politics shaping company culture even at the individual contributor level. - Lots of organizational silos and blame casting. Having frontend and backend dev teams in separate divisions of the company makes the problem worse and prevents priorities from ever being aligned. - The backend teams under the Software Engineering division are particularly bad about refusing to take responsibility for bugs and making frontend teams do all the work of diagnosing every issue with their APIs. - The Product and Technology Division in Denver has been stuck in a cycle of perpetual re-orgs for years now. One re-org barely finishes before the next one begins, like the executives can't leave the organizational structure alone for more than a few months. Most of it seems politics driven. One upper manager falls out of favor while another gains favor with leadership, so everything under them gets shifted to the new favored manager. Whatever the claimed goal of the re-org was is rarely achieved since they don't give enough time to work out the kinks before the next re-org. - The company thinks every problem can be solved by adding new VPs. There are probably over 30 VPs in just the Greenwood Village office. Every re-org adds a few, but rarely eliminates any. Disfavored VPs just get bumped down a level so they report to a more favored VP. - Execs and VPs are walking corporate stereotypes who have forgotten how to communicate in plain English without excessive use of corporate buzzwords. They come across as extremely insincere and disconnected from lower level employees. - Charter handled the pandemic very poorly. It was one of the last major companies in Denver to allow remote work, and it took months of analysis by the legal department before they admitted Colorado's mask mandate applied to them. - Now they want everyone back in the office as soon as possible and are ignoring all input in employee satisfaction surveys saying people want to keep working remote at least part of the time. As a result, employee satisfaction scores have been plummeting for months and people are leaving in droves for permanent remote opportunities. Some managers expect to lose 50% of FTEs over the next few months. - Refusing to offer remote work and only recruiting locally makes the company dependent on a very narrow talent pool with no hope of competing with other tech companies offering better benefits and remote work. - Only 15 days PTO plus 4 personal days for FTEs considered "exempt" (ie. software engineers). Not competitive with other tech companies which are increasingly moving to unlimited vacation. - Charter responded to a change in state law prohibiting "use it or lose it" vacation policies by ending front-loaded PTO accrual and capping the total number of PTO hours you can accrue to get around not being able to limit carry-over. This may not be a big deal for everyone but it was the last straw for me. As someone who uses almost all their vacation every year, it would make it impossible for me to take a decent length vacation in the first half of the year. It basically makes PTO every year like it would be if you were starting a new job. - Charter has an extremely rigid two-tiered caste system of FTEs and contractors. The majority of Charter's workforce are contractors. The company not only maintains a clear distinction between them and FTEs for legal reasons, but goes out of its way to actively demean contractors at every opportunity. Lately this has meant continuing to require all contractors to wear masks in the office while vaccinated FTEs don't have to. HR also has a policy of never including contractors in company-wide emails including those announcing changes to COVID policies, so contractors are expected to find out about important things like that just through the grapevine. - Contractors are rarely given the opportunity to convert to FTE no matter what you are told about "contract to hire" in the interview. When I started I was promised conversion in 6 months, but it took a year and a half and only happened because my manager left and I caught the eye of a manager on a different team. - Heavy reliance on H1Bs and offshore teams with minimal knowledge of English for QA testing.
