Pros
The business really cares about customers, and team-members really care about one another.
Cons
Top leadership do not understand how to prioritize work, creating chaos and conflict. Leadership is not high quality, all divisional CIO have quit or been removed in the last 4 months. Leadership is only hiring external candidates now. Leadership shrinks internal candidates. This is a strange phenomenon where internal candidates are not seen as capable of anything beyond their current job function, despite experiences and willingness to help. External candidates are held on a pedestal as capable of evolving beyond their past experiences. You may want to give 110% but they don't want it. As a manager, I get better advice talking with peers and even Copilot/chatGPT than leveraging any of our support function experts. The firm is not knowledgeable on AI and is not able to use it strategically or practically. Software engineer teams cannot use the best and latest practices (cloud is highly restricted, AI is highly limited and not leveraging any of the latest tools). Software engineers cannot self-service. Engagement is extremely low among software engineers because our so-called support partners work against us without any knowledge of how to build or administer technology. How to operate is decided for us, which severely limits our productivity and performance. This results in us losing to vendors so we spend our time just installing vendor software as opposed to building a competitive advantage. Support functions can be petty and unhelpful. They are not aligned and they are not incentivized to actually help. Everything is impersonal and a ticket, It's puzzling they are not already replaced with offshore talent or AI. The worst is when you have a partner who is too busy, tells you to enter at ticket, then close/cancels the ticket complete without any feedback beyond it "wasn't filled out correctly." With over 400 groups to submit tickets to in order to build and support software, it's like being a rat in a maze. Overall everything falls on the software teams to support the business, but software teams are a tiny fraction of the overall technology organization and our support functions do not help us and in many cases hinder us. Example: If something breaks in technology, only 1-2 people can fix it and then you have 20+ support, governance, risk and compliance partners trying to understand "what went wrong" and you have to roll your eyes about the silliness of that ratio. If the investment was on the execution team as opposed to the watchers, we could actually get more work done and operate more effectively. Our internal HR partners say they consider internal talent, but look at the technology leadership team, it tells a different story: all (100%) of leadership hires have been external. Overall, if you value creating real software, stay away or if you value strong leadership (or your own growth) stay away! Only go here if you want to keep your head down and click buttons from a 9-5.
