Pros
The people were great to work with. Fellow employees were always willing to help and point me in the right direction when I had any questions. After leaving the company, the only thing I miss is the friendship of the people I worked with there. The one other good thing about my time with RR Donnelley was that they were very flexible with my school schedule. Although just before I left, I was told that there would be less tolerance for my school schedule because it was straining relationships with project managers because of my less than immediate availability. I was required to work during class much of the time and it had a negative effect on my coursework.
Cons
The cons of this job were many. SALARY: To start off with, my salary of $50,000 was actually fairly decent for an entry-level full-time position, but the reason it was offered to me at that amount is because it's generally understood that there are very few, if any raises and I knew that if I continued there, that would likely be my salary for the remainder of my time there. PROGRAMMING: As a Technical Analyst (Programmer), this job is very lacking in opportunities to really use creative solutions to problems. The programming languages used are next to obsolete and I felt like I was digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole there. I felt that the longer I stayed there, the further I was falling out of touch with technologies and languages that would make me more valuable to other career opportunities. Yes, I was getting better at the tools used at RR Donnelley, but thus, I was digging myself into a hole of staying longer and longer there without being able to leave. WORK-LIFE BALANCE: The work-life balance was terrible. I understand that with current processes and technologies, there has to be a certain amount of overtime and working at home, but the amount of overtime with RR Donnelley was overwhelming. Often times, there was at least one or two days per week that I would work 12 or more hours in the office. Then about two to three times per month, I would work an 18 - 20 hour day in the office. That was just overtime in the office. In addition to that, I worked probably another 2-3 hours from home every other day. I also usually ended up working a couple hours most Saturdays and Sundays. When I mentioned that to the HR rep in my exit interview, he didn't seem surprised at all and basically told me that it was just the nature of a full-time job. EMPLOYEE INVESTMENT: The company doesn't invest in its employees. Occasionally, we would have a barbecue for special occasions, but that was probably once every six months. The first computer they gave me to use cost a lot of time in waiting for things to load. Most of the time, webpages loaded one horizontal line at a time. I brought in my own keyboard because the one they gave me was really old and the keys were sticky. The only company branded things they gave me were a water bottle during safety week, and a t-shirt for their 150th anniversary that we were only allowed to wear to work for four days. Working there for a while made me feel like upper management didn't care about their employees very much at all. MORALE: In general, the morale of the employees was very low. We were over worked and under appreciated. High turnover turned into higher workload and more people who were new and couldn't help with the big projects yet. TRAINING: Training for new employees was pretty much non-existent. Most of the tools used were internally developed with little to no documentation, so it was very difficult to train oneself, but there were no resources to receive training either. My experience with training was terrible, but just before I left, there was some work on creating a better training program, so maybe that will be better for others starting with RR Donnelley.
