Pros
Good work/life balance. Good benefits. Clear mission and values. Good pay for the area (though perhaps not so much for other locations).
Cons
I had an opportunity to have a one-on-one phone conversation with the CIO, and he told me very clearly: unless I move to Orangewood, then I have no technical career opportunities with this company. The IT operation is hyper centralized. This was done as an overreaction to the decentralized way that each site used to operate. Centralization of things like the EMR was a very good thing (or at least a good idea, if not hastily and aggressively implemented), but they went overboard. Along with the EMR they also centralized as much of the rest of the IT infrastructure as they could, including the career opportunities. These days, if you don't live in Orangewood, CA then you don't have a shot at the higher end IT jobs. All the remote sites offer are basic grunt work IT jobs. Even then, a lot of the career employees were laid off and their jobs handed to contractors like Gordian Dynamics. What's worse is that the central teams show no respect for the IT techs at the remote sites. We're treated with a lot of disrespect and as if we know nothing. That pretty closely sums up the state of the IT culture at Saint Joseph: the central teams think that remote sites are full of idiots, and the remote sites think that the central team is full of jerks. Whether they are overworked, understaffed, or just plain slow and stupid, the central teams move at a snails pace and don't support the remote sites very well. The hyper centralization puts remote sites in a position where they are entirely dependent on the central teams to deploy configurations or run reports in order for us to do our jobs, but it takes months for them to do anything. This leads remote site techs to come up with cheap hacks and workarounds. Many settings that would be best deployed via Group Policy or SCCM are instead configured locally because it's just easier than dealing with the central team attitude, and we at least have the ability to manage it ourselves. The CIO wants to lead a company like Apple or Facebook. He's lost sight of the fact that he's ultimately an IT manager, not an innovative software company CEO; but he's running IT in that manner. He's also a bit too much of a politician (like, he seems accustomed to lying). Being on-call in IT is legally dubious, because you don't get on-call pay while you're on-call; you only get paid if you actually get called in. Management claims that this is legal because being on-call is "non restrictive". We're told that we don't have to respond when getting paged while on-call. That's an outright lie. If we're on-call and get paged but don't respond then we will be in trouble. At the end of the day, my position is just a job, not a career. I'm better off looking elsewhere to develop myself.