Enjoyed most of my time there
Pros
Worked here for around 3 years, and I met a lot of great people. Lots of hard workers. Generally, really good pay and benefits, and if you get a good manager + some nice customers to work with, you can have a great experience. Food and campus is nice too. Big part of what I enjoyed was the people, including most of my customers. Saved up a bunch of money living in the low cost of living area too, so I was pretty happy about that. I like the individual offices, though I go stir-crazy being by myself all day so I chose to have officemates. Loved having one both times, made the job way better. Good memories talking with them or joking about weird issues we ran into together. I do like the privacy and quiet of being able to work in a designated personal space. Overall, I learned a good amount and made some good friends and money. Also, I like small cities like Madison so that worked out for me.
Cons
- Your TS experience can really depend on your manager & customers, so there's some luck involved. It can be challenging to advocate for yourself early on (as with any job probably), so it's rough to get stuck with difficult customers and a bad manager. I had a not-so-great manager at first and was going to leave. Got lucky and was happy after switching managers though, so I ended up staying longer than expected. It was a pretty stark difference between my experience in both situations. - Management can be old-fashioned, especially for the tech industry. They don't support WFH/remote work in the TS role. They are generally pretty liberal in other ways, but the WFH thing is weird. They have tunnel vision on it. - Above bullet point means more turnover than necessary & you can feel the impacts of it. - I don't know if this is a con but people talk about work/life balance on here a lot. I'll say that mine was pretty bad in year 1 and then by year 2, I rarely did more than 40 hrs/wk. Had to figure out what people cared about, and what to avoid to not do more hours. But the nature of healthcare IT is that you do need to be on-call sometimes, whether it be for a week at a time or during a customer upgrade over a weekend (this was not very common for though). Some TS I knew had to travel and be on-call more than others, I think I got lucky and didn't have to do it much.
