Great early/mid career company with good work-life balance!
Pros
I loved working for TDS Telecom. I would join again in a heartbeat if the right opportunity opened up. The quality of people that work there is high with many people staying there for years which means it is easy to build meaningful working relationships with many people genuinely caring for their coworkers. The advancement opportunities were good and the work-life balance is good in the right department. They even do a really good job with making the call-center a fun place to work which is genuinely a feat.
Cons
Pay tends to be 5-10% below industry average, but the work environment is great and work-life balance and advancement opportunities are great so overall that is a trade-off I was happy to make. While the executives are genuinely great people who I enjoyed working with, they are overpaid and there are too many of them. They preserve company margin in a kind of a short-sighted cowardly way rather the investing in lucrative ventures with a lower margin despite Ted Carlson (the owner) saying he is happy to do so. The leads to periodic cuts to departments in kind of a "all departments must cut 2% of staff" way. One executive even said if they were to buy TDS Telecom the first thing they would do is lay off all the executives from a financial perspective. I think the executive really need to pull their weight more and have the courage to grow the company the ways it needs to be grown.
