Pros
Compared to other companies, the salary is rather competitive.... IF, big IF, you only work 40 hours a week. The IT Data Center is located in a very nice district of Tampa, and the office itself is very comfortable to work in. The operations staff is a joy! The people in the computer room are all very friendly, and to their credit there are a number of events organized by HR to show appreciation to employees. Ice Cream, Subs, ect being brought in to feed employees. If, you are a woman in their target demographic, you do get a very healthy discount. Or, if like me you are a single young guy, your mom and grandmothers will love you! =)
Cons
Three words... On Call Rotation! Every team at Talbot's Data Center, requires a weekly on-call rotation. Depending on your team, and your personal work ethic, this can be very brutal. I say this because some teams just refuse to become in involved with on call support. I spent many a weekend day waiting for the on-cal DBA to get involved and grant me EMER access to some server, or provide tracing support, ect. There are a few who are helpful and prompt, but most are lazy and their manager is an idiot, who will not pressure her people to help you if she does not like you or your team... very professional. The on call responsibilities are 24-7 for the week which you are on call. Some weeks you may not have a single call... some weeks you may not get more than 2-3 hours sleep a night. What makes it worse is, when you have a failure in one of the production systems, and identify the failure, most times you will be strongly encouraged to take the shortest, quickest possible fix to get the system up and running again leaving the problem not really solved and likely to come back and bite you, or someone else in the ass later on down the road. Additionally, most of the people that work there are nice, but idiots. Who stand no real chance of supporting any of the systems they are supposed to be working in on a daily basis. So, when they are on call, and something breaks, the manager's ass is on the line to get the system back up online. So, if he has person A (who is officially on call, but an idiot) and person B (you, he is not on call), he is of course going to try to get you involved. I offer one piece of advice... when you are NOT on call, you are NOT required to answer your phone.... SO DONT! Additionally, when you ARE on call, you are only required to answer calls from the Operations Staff or your manager, so speak to no one else directly. Further more, just a warning, alot of the systems Talbot's has produces reports. Which all show some different spin on the previous day's activity and sales. Even though I could tell you there are not more than a handful of people at the place who are allowed to make decisive business decisions based on sales trends over one day... the reports not being out by 8am for all of the business users is looked at as if the company was sinking. These clowns will start complaining right on the dot if their reports are not out, even though you could have just as easily wrote some process to take the sales from that day last year, and multiplies them by some random factor and gave them a completely meaningless number and they would not have ANY idea. There was one instance where I was on call, and found all of their stores as reporting sales on Christmas Day (WHEN EVERY STORE WAS CLOSED) and none of the business users found it... what a joke.