Pros
- VERY flexible scheduling and generous time off. - Decent Dental/Vision - Reasonable expectations for productivity - Data Entry (Ingestion?) Department is run by a good core group of supervisors and managers - Nice headquarters - Excellent IT structure and embrace of IT tools - The severance given to employees was highly generous. - Free Wi-Fi as long as you don't abuse it - Great Christmas parties, though they've been cutting back lately - Generous compensation for travel expenses - Tuition reimbursement
Cons
- Company is over-extended and in over its head. The corporate HQ was leased at a discount at the height of the 2008-2009 crisis and was gotten for a steal, making you think they have more cash to throw around than they do. Now that Austin is in a tech bubble again the property managers are being much more hostile about their discount tenant, which forced the moving of the data department to Round Rock after the property managers refused to allow any more badges. Another example was insufficient email licenses for employees, leaving a large number of data entry employees without e-mail, which wasn't rectified until late 2015. The Grand Prairie, Texas data entry branch was shut down to cut costs in early 2016 resulting in a layoff of over 10% of staff, most of which had worked there for more than 2 years yet only a quarter were actually "on payroll" (the rest were treated as temps for an extended, almost criminal amount of time). This is all to say that the company got in during the boom and didn't expand its customer base or brace itself properly for the inevitable bust -- with oil prices half what they were the customer base is drying up. - Lack of diversity: Most minorities are located in Data Ingestion, in entry-level work. Most of the higher paid positions are mostly Caucasian except for the programmers and IT field (and some of the programmers appear to be contract on an H-1B visa) - Headquarters-centric culture. If you're in a branch office, you're not getting promoted to the headquarters anytime soon. The only guy who got that offer was because he was a programmer in a branch office that didn't need a programmer. The Austin office gets all the fun stuff first. The Round Rock office comes in at a close second, everyone else is on their own with whatever your manager can get out of the petty cash drawer. - Garbage Pay. Especially for Austin, being the hyper-inflated cost of living place that it is. If you're being hired here, be sure to hold out for more money at your initial interview because pay increases are "merit-based" which is execuspeak for you'll need to get promoted to get a raise in pay. This results in high turnover among non-senior staff and they don't seem to care. - Favoritism and politics runs rampant. Paranoia smothers initiative, because people will rat you out if you tell them to do something counter to written instructions/policies, no matter your intent. If you're going to work here, get everything you can in writing. Turf wars occur regularly, so be careful if you're asked to work on something new. If you want to get ahead, latch onto someone who's worked there awhile or kiss up. Actual merit is rarely rewarded and goes un-noticed. You can have 101 ideas for how to improve policies/streamline/make things more efficient, but they'll all die in committee as you are told to run it through the proper channels, who are all worried about making themselves look good. Sometimes if you are particularly loud or aggressive (and drop the magic words - money) it'll actually get done. Watch in amazement as the proposal you floated a month ago only to be shut down and told to suck it up and deal with it because that's the way that upper management has decided to do it gets changed by someone who knows the right people and is in constant contact with them at the Austin office so they can have their ear when you can't! - Sink or swim mentality with new talent - These guys love to throw people who may not necessarily be prepared into a situation where they have to improvise to get results with no guidance, essentially engaging in trial and error until they either succeed or get yelled at for going off the rails that they didn't know were there. - Passive-aggressive method of termination: I've seen several employees basically have responsibilities gradually taken away from them until they get the message and quit. - Your deductions for health insurance are surprisingly high considering what you get for it. A high-deductible plan will run you 200$/mo and the everything covered plans run even higher. - Stunningly tone-deaf management that axed a branch that was outproducing its sister location and then claimed at the subsequent company meeting that it "wasn't up to their quality standards" to placate the board of directors when they were slow to react to a downturn in the market.
