You're not going to advance beyond a level III, and with few exceptions make it only that far if that's where you're hired. VP of IT promotes individual innovation to advance against competition, against which they are admittedly behind (poor electronic services via web to customers has lost us accounts. They admit this is making them lose ground. VP evangelizes "Talk to whoever you have to if you see something that would benefit the company -- better yet just go ahead and DO IT!". Yet when trickles down through middle management, message is lost in favor of collective mind set that results in mediocrity. Never heard a personally directed "good job" or "thanks for developing a system that's saved us a whole lot of money." Lots of finger-pointing and overreactions to any sort of hiccup. A culture of a lack of personal accountability despite the "rah rah" message to the contrary. Old tech batch jobs still predominant over SOA, real-time data. Pendulum has swung very hard in direction no dev in-house / buy single point off-the-shelf. Extremely process-oriented -- being officially called "Lead" on a project, which is just a process-oriented label -- which is often political, weighted over actual delivered results -- as explicitly stated to me by managers!! Announced policy of replacing US developers as they choose to leave with adding staff to large outsourcing effort to India. Skill base in .NET in particular is very poor -- only about 4 individuals, and that's going to go down without US replacements when any of them leave. Any redevelopment of VB6 apps -- and there are LOTS of those -- just a port via automated tool with no OOAD. IT feels like a sinking ship.
