Unsupportive management, cult of personality, piles of technical debt
Pros
The upside of working for Milliman was the profit sharing (10% of your annual salary tax-free into your 401k in addition to the normal match). Salary was reasonable, but I wouldn't call it great. Leadership didn't micromanage me or interfere with the way I ran my team, I will give them that, but then again, I think that's more because they didn't bother with Operations at all, one way or another. I was able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance for the most part for my team, but it cost me political capital to do so.
Cons
I was hired to modernize the infrastructure and lead the operations team. Consistently, I found an utter lack of leadership for strategic vision, a total lack of support from upper management on any goals or ventures I set, and a complete lack of trust. Despite leading the team, access to things like the SAN and network gear were withheld to a single person, the "Technical Architect", who is the only person whose opinion matters with regards to Operations. Requests to redesign things (at no cost but our time) for more resiliency or redundancy were shot down because the Architect didn't like them (no further reasoning provided). Director consistently talked about removing the Architect from the line of management with me in our one on ones, yet in the long run he was handed direct leadership of all of Operations. It is clear that upper leadership neither cares about Operations nor understands how vital Ops is to the running of the company. Many servers are STILL Windows 2008 Server (not even R2), though efforts to modernize them have been underway for over two years. There are no clusters of VM hosts to move VMs between, the hosts are only paired and are insufficient hardware to sustain the load of both hosts VMs. Much of the infrastructure is shoddily designed and relies more on luck to remain functioning, but the Technical Architect (who has literally never worked for any other company in his entire career) makes the decisions and disregards anything he doesn't like. Operations is blamed for everything first, despite more than 95% of issues historically coming from Development, and Ops is the whipping boy run short staffed and underfunded. Steer widely clear if you're in infrastructure, unless you're interested in constantly being at fault for things you didn't do, your ideas disregarded without consideration, and being set up to fail. A best case scenario of working at Milliman is that you will do the same job for a decade, being paid the same amount for that entire time (no more than 3% raises!), as your skills atrophy and your self-worth is diminished.
