The potential of a nuclear missile, but with no guidance system onboard...
Pros
Work-life balance, interesting projects depending on your position which can lead to expanding your skill set. Opportunity to move "around", just not up. Benefits are reasonable.
Cons
Upper management doesn't seem to realize that they are supposed to provide a clear market direction and vision of the product. They try to make technical decisions without including input from engineering which has caused priorities to shift constantly. Marketing is really the group running things, and inexplicably they have developed a complete mistrust of engineering. Completely dysfunctional. No money, or so we're always told. Teradata used to be part of NCR, and it's painfully obvious that our accounting team is still running the ship like its old blue-chip parent. We never invest in our equipment or our people. Salaries are low to average. Every year we are promised training and every year it gets cut from the budget. The best employees get the idea after a while and then leave. Which brings us to retention. We don't have any of that here. We lose our best people to companies that are willing to pay and train. Like I said, you can move around but not up. Promotion is almost unheard of, they encourage you to apply for jobs in other groups, but that doesn't imply you will be making more money.
