They know where they want to go but they have no map or compass
Pros
As a former Energy Plus employee, I am still managed by mostly the same great people: smart, friendly, approachable, dedicated to their job and committed to making your life better. You don't get that everywhere you go within NRG, but I love the people I work with on a daily basis. At the small functional unit level, I feel like most people here enjoy the people they work with, and NRG does have a workforce of nice, young, smart people (on average). There is also a degree of "old guard" mentality from some of the older (both in terms of age and seniority within the company) so sometimes you feel like you've hit a wall because "this is how we do things" and there's no wiggle room for change, but the company is evolving in mostly the right direction. I think NRG tries very hard to make you feel like you can make the rest of your career here. If you're willing to put up with some downsides, I do think it's a pretty stable place to work.
Cons
I was an Energy Plus employee and we were acquired by NRG a couple of years ago. Energy Plus was a fun place to work full of dynamic, young people and I had a blast working there. While I still work at the same office, with a lot of the same people, and even though NRG promised they would let us continue to conduct business the way we conducted business and became a 150-million-revenue-a-year company in less than 5 years and wouldn't change the company culture, in the end it was all baloney. I feel like NRG has completely neutered what we once were, and now that I've seen how they acquire companies (they've been doing a lot of M&A lately), I can see that we're not an isolated case. The dress code is still casual at least, so that's nice, but I really don't feel like NRG and Energy Plus had all the "synergy" that upper management claimed we had. From what I've heard from folks in Finance, NRG acquired us to offset another business of theirs that was hemorrhaging money. At some point I was offered a job at corporate, but I refused even though it paid more, since I wanted to stick with my team and hierarchy (very glad I did). At this point I'm really only staying here because they moved me to a new team where I'm learning a ton of new things, so it's a smart move career wise, but I look forward to moving some place else where there's less overbearing corporate BS going on. To touch on the title of this review, upper management has this great vision of turning NRG into the Apple of the energy world, focusing on green energy and making energy management as seamless for you as possible using fancy technology. Very lofty and laudable goals but they don't seem to have a clear vision of how they're going to get there. It is extremely hard to innovate in an industry such as utilities, where people mostly just expect to be able to flip a switch on their wall and the light will turn on, or turning on the flame on their gas stove, all at the lowest possible price. Most people aren't willing to spend thousands of dollars on going 100% solar, so, again, while the company's vision for its future is GREAT, I don't think it's viable, especially in this country where overconsumption is practically a way of life. There is a greater problem where it feels like most things get done (not) by scurrying every which way and hoping for the best. In short, there's a lack of organization, a lack of process, mixed with bad communication and that sometimes makes it hard to get things done. Finally, corporate IT is a mess. They have some very bright people on the team but, again, as a whole, they suck at communicating, and they're clearly overworked. Individually, they're good people for the most part.