Pros
Good pay. Decent working conditions. Nice office. Onsite gym. Onsite cafeteria. Lost of parking. Easy access to/from Rte 3 or 62 or 4. Close to Burlington mall and new Wegmans. Really smart people. Nice co-workers. Notice that I didn't mention anything about the work?
Cons
There is no confidence in this toxic C level leadership team. They sit in meetings all day long then send out emails with instructions to others from their ivory towers. But do you think any one of them has ever spent any time with lower level managers so that they could really understand the business? The last time this management team actually had to do real work was a long time ago, evidenced by what they think is the right way to accomplish something. They don't stay fresh. They don't learn anything new. This is not IBM in 1999. This is the era of fast and innovative cloud businesses, and the web, and smart phones. I don't have the resources or the empowerment to accomplish what I should be doing, and I have at least five to ten bosses above me telling me what to do, and what to tell my team to do. Add to that: our entire group is a matrixed organization, with unclear AND duplicate projects. Plus we can wind up with 3 or more people with the same assignment doing duplicate work but none know the others are doing it until it's too late, all assigned by the top brass. Meantime there are huge areas of the organization not staffed appropriately. Yet somehow we keep hiring more and more people and rearranging deck chairs. But it’s more people with more unclear roles who all think they are “in charge” of something. Really? Plus I get 20 new assignments or actions a day with no more resources. A reasonable person quickly becomes angry and frustrated at the insanity of it all. It is dysfunction at its finest. Two words for management: Organizational design. Most leaders don't lead. Most directors don't direct. Every Vice President is unengaged and detached. The C level is an old boys club. I'm not aware of any minorities at the top levels. There is no employee confidence in this toxic leadership team. They are oblivious that the employees don’t respect them and instead tell them what they want to hear, and then turn around and try to do the right thing. There are a few strong leaders at the director and manager level, but even they have trouble being effective. We keep hiring more VPs and more managers. How about some junior level people to help get the actual work done and to create the next layer of leaders? And the systems are a joke. Nothing is tied together. Everything is in different systems, that require different browsers and different plug ins, and get this: different ids and passwords. Some things are even manual or in spreadsheets or word documents. And if the systems were effective, you could put up with them being a little outdated. But no. And while everyone is being ineffective trying so hard to do their jobs with infrastructure meant for a decade ago, we spend big bucks to bring in outside consultants to slap lipstick on our pig and call it culture training. I can only guess how expensive that is. How do you train for culture? Culture starts at the top, and if we have bad culture, there's one place to look and one person. It’s so painful to try to get anything done. The days are very difficult. We are all just really tired of fighting to try to do the right thing.
