You need quite a bit of ambition and grit to last any longer than 3 years at this company, and of course, you need to not mess up and cause unreasonable downtime for customers. There is a strict policy to be friendly and helpful to each other and to jump on when customers are having issues. This is all enforced by a review field that all employees, managers and peers alike, have access to and are encourage to submit to. If you missed a few calls because you were away, responded to an email with a perceived attitude, rejected a request to prioritize an issue, or you were perceived to have any negative outlook, this will be noted by someone and brought to your attention. These will also be factored into your raises and your promotions, and will be bad if your manager does not work with you to remove unfair reviews or defend you during bi-annual stacked ranking meetings.
Especially in Hosting, and especially at Network Security, there were fires at least once every other month. These are all-hands-on-deck events where you will likely need to stay extra hours, sometimes put in 50 or (very rarely, once a year) 60 hour weeks, and be available on-call to troubleshoot and fix these issues. You learn a lot from this, but it can wear you out depending on what you can tolerate. Otherwise, it was more like 40/45 hour weeks.
For good or for bad, there wasn't a lot of decent, structured planning or guidance around automation architecture when I left, meaning there were no real deadlines, which also caused the fires mentioned above. This is also exacerbated by most people not being industry experts but college graduates. So if you want to learn good development management skills, best-practice architecture from industry veterans, this isn't the place. It is a great place to read books yourself, learn from experience, and apply what you learned, since management will let you make a case and pursue it. You will, however, have to grit your teeth when projects blow up in your face and work 50-60 hours to fix the issues either you or your inexperienced coworkers have created.
