Pros
- Generally pleasant coworkers - Informative department meetings - Profitable company
Cons
- No work/life balance. - The natural end result of poor work/life balance, stressful environment, and long weeks are unhealthy, burned out employees. Many, many burned out employees. - Many IT employees are underpaid for the work they do. OD needs to update their pay belts and position titles to more accurately reflect industry standards, especially with what they consider some of the 'entry level' positions. - 60hr+ weeks were not uncommon, and came to be an unspoken expectation of employees in order to keep up with the massive workload generated by too few employees on certain teams and poor department structuring. Team members that tried to make management aware of this, and seek help or advise improvements, had to be prepared to be given lip-service only, ignored, or worst of all, pushed out of the organization under false pretenses. Witnessed this sort of behavior from multiple managers/directors towards multiple employees. This created an environment where many employees felt as though if they spoke up, or disagreed with management, that they risked their jobs. The open door policy was, frankly, a joke. - Likewise, the annual review policy was a joke. Favoritism and cronyism was rampant. - Entrenched management, individuals who have been with the organization their entire careers, and many of whom lack basic knowledge of modern IT standards, are failing to research and evolve best practices. - Managers with little to no project management experience unsurprisingly have little to no understanding of how long projects may take, how many resources to dedicate, or are willing to understand the complexities behind their requests when advised. Arbitrary goal-post moving is a forgone conclusion. Expect a project to start out poorly explained and due in Q4, have that moved to Q3 two months later, have the entire set of expectations for the project changed in Q2, be asked why the project wasn't done by end of Q2, and summarily receive poor marks for not being able to juggle five heavily involved projects with scarce resources and no clear cut end goal or deadline. All while having multiple additional responsibilities added that are far outside of your purview or original hiring parameters. - If you're hired for one job, don't be surprised if somewhere along the way you're asked (read: required) to take on the jobs of 5+ others due to poor employee retention and future planning. - Management is more than happy to take credit for employee ideas and successes. Individual recognition/merit of any substance is rare. There's plenty of blame to go around though, and it almost always rolls downhill at OD.
