Pros
Pay and benefits are good, job is interesting. I am very pleased with the pay, $30 an hour, which is what attracted and currently retains me, and the benefits cover all medical situations with just a $20 copay. I’ve been with the company (SBC, which is still really what the company is … SBC bought out the dwindling AT&T in order to receive their more recognizable worldwide brand name) for 12 years now, and find the LEC side of things to still be a stable part of the business. Meanwhile, the wireless (cell phone) and TV (Uverse) sides of the business are also growing right now, which appears to be increasing the overall stability of AT&T
Cons
Management is top-down, bureaucratic, and has little concern for the underlings. When I started with the company in 1996, the management was more connected with the occupational employees and also cared a lot more about delivering good customer service. Since SBC purchased AT&T, it appears now that there is a trend of the previously failed AT&T management directives taking over and supplanting the SBC management principles and culture. The company is rapidly becoming one that strictly runs things by numbers, graphs, and charts, and listens less and less to the people in the lower ranks. This disconnect, I believe, will ultimately be increasingly detrimental to the bottom line of AT&T because it makes the best employees leave and creates a dis-incentive for people to deliver good customer service. I have witnessed this first hand over the last two years, and it will no doubt continue due to the blindness of the AT&T 2.0 machine. It’s tragic, but it definitely fits the Michael Armstrong model for demise.
