Pros
* Coworkers and supervisors were, with a few exceptions, highly competent people. People have a sense of humor, and there was almost no drama or negative gossiping. * Some of the tools used are powerful in theory (VDIs, the open MoSes platform), but see the caveats below. * Reasonably competitive pay, very good and reasonably priced cafeteria, gym, nice lake out back.
Cons
* The high level of talent is almost completely consumed with the task of trying to work with and fix a Rube Golberg-esque system comprised of cruft, hacks, ad-hoc standards and naming conventions (which aren't shared with any of the other actuarial departments), kludges, etc. These issues are brought up in meetings but action is never forthcoming. It's an impressive house of cards held together with several metric tons of duct tape, but so great is the talent of the people putting on fresh layers that the people in charge still do not understand how weak the underlying structure is. * Senior level management is straight out of a Dilbert cartoon. I've actually heard them make a Dilbert joke at the beginning of a teleconference meeting, yet the rest of it was still just a stream of opaque buzzword-heavy language. It isn't actively harmful, but it doesn't illuminate anything either. Maybe it becomes more intelligible the longer you worked there, but my supervisors didn't seem to get much out of it. * There are still periodic rumblings of restructuring. Maybe not the safest opportunity if you're thinking about putting down roots. * The technology available is pretty good in theory but horrible in practice. The VDIs are very slow on a good day and unusably slow on a bad day and it's always "AGT has been informed of the issue and is working on a solution". Anyone who is familiar with virtualization software should know there is no reason for such unreliability or sluggishness. * Half-height cubicles are coming even though NO ONE wants them and have repeatedly said so. See "advice to management" for more details
