Politics hindering progress
Pros
Great Benefits and career progression for those willing to work hard and stay for the long haul. If you are a competent employee it is very hard to get fired from this organization. Work-life balance is okay depending on your area of responsibilities. Unlimited resources and lots of new and emerging technologies to get hands-on experience with.
Cons
Training - Good luck. Managers will make decisions to bring in new technologies and make you support it with no prior training. When this technology fails, to avert accountability the manager will claim lack of administrator training. Politics - Decisions are made in this company with no technological reasoning behind it. Only that Vendor X gave Executive Y a sweet deal to bring this in-house to use it as a success story for the vendor.These decisions are made by upper-level management without consultation from the employees that are paid to be professionals in that particular space. Many times, managers will ask you to spend weeks doing research and working with vendors to make recommendations on a particular issue. Technical people will spend copious amounts of time just "talking" about things and creating powerpoint presentations to show to management, which will then be completely disregarded and the manager will either A) Do Nothing at All or B) Do the complete opposite of your recommendation. Not a good way to build employee morale. Time off policy - Depends on your manager. Some managers are so strict that going to the doctor (even for 1 hour) is considered to be PTO or Vacation. Take too many sick days and they will send you to HR and start docking vacation time. Company Values - Elitist. C-Level management expect you to praise the ground they walk on and consider yourself lucky to be in their presence. If you are in a meeting or lunch with these people you do not speak unless spoken to, you do not take a drink of your drink until they have taken a drink, so on and so forth. Management - Too many layers. People will be promoted to manager simply because of years spent working for the company, and will be put in charge of a technical team regardless if they have the capacity to manage these people or not. Many people, myself included, left the company after a long stint (I was there 6 years, I've seen people with 30 years leave) because of an incompetent manager that is too busy worrying about sick time and timesheets rather than important things like keeping the lights on and ensuring the 70,000 users you are supporting can send E-Mails.
