- The IT infrastructure staff is worked way too hard. Some groups have hundreds even thousands of servers to manage. Draconian change policies force even a lot of project work to be done after hours, meaning even if you are not on call you can end up working 2,3,4 nights a week after 10pm. The reason they do this is because incompetent staff have screwed things up so many times and they have actually started to fire those responsible for outages but there is little to no accountability in management, where people are regularly promoted and shuffled around rather than being fired for doing a horrible job.
- There are at least 3 too many layers of management. There is no way anyone should have a boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss before getting to the CTO. TU has never met a problem that can’t be solved with another manager. This also means even if engineers have sorted out a solution on their own there is bound to be a manager somewhere who decides that they are going to ‘take the lead’ and basically make everyone do all the work again with the same result. This also leads to 20 people on every single 2am tech bridge call where people endlessly talk over each other and are forced to give a recap of the entire problem once the next-higher person in pecking order joins the call.
- While pay raises are relatively consistent, don’t ever expect anything more than 2-3%. Bonuses are pretty low too, topping out at about 2% after taxes. Hardly enough to make any sort of impact on your overall salary.
