Unfortunately, some of the decisions on technology partners has lead to an unending stream of inexperienced technologists. This leads to poor workmanship and thus, poor build quality. To combat this, Nielsen management has instituted a monstrous bureaucracy that tends to stifle innovation. Also worth mentioning, our infrastructure team is completely outsourced. Since doing so, that team has suffered greatly, and has bogged innovation down quite a bit. Nothing gets done unless it's an emergency and is pushed to the top of the stack by upper management, which is no doubt stressful on the infrastructure teams as well.
Additionally, since the bulk of the employees now seem to be made up of consultants, there is a distinct lack of company culture. The concept of company loyalty is all but evaporated after a series of "work force optimizations" (read: layoffs).
Finally, performance reviews are (as with most companies it seems), mostly a joke. You write your own goals, you criticize yourself, and then your manager meets with you one time for the year and agrees or disagrees. There needs to be a higher focus on monthly or at least quarterly reviews to communicate better about your performance. There is no division of technical and people manager roles, which usually leads to middle management being too overwhelmed with technology meetings and workload to really engage their employees.
