FBL Financial Reviews

So I've been there for about 4 years now. I'm a developer. I've worked in a variety of places in my career and FBL really takes the cake. This is an organization that is so behind the times. A fairly simple ZOS mainframe upgrade took down our admin system. I work in the Life area and it took us well over a year to stand up a new life admin system with absolutely minimum functionality. There are so many manual processes that I’m not sure if it was even cost effective to do this. Someone is getting snowed. Managers and senior leadership have no real clue on how projects need to be put together. Decisions get made and then changed 3 months later. The CIO is a rotating door. My advice, if you’re a developer that really wants to work on exciting things and have your input really be heard, this is not the place to go. Find somewhere else!

I've been in IT for over 20 years. Half of those years as an architect. I have never known an organization that seems so opposed to having an enterprise architect view on things. They want to set up things in silos. Each of the companies doing their own thing without thought to how things should be at an enterprise view. This limits how systems scale and interact. The CIO from nationwide tried to implement this. Knowledge sharing, scalability, etc. I guess it was too much change cause they let him go. The new CIO is so wet behind the ears that I have t shirts that are older than him. From my view, he's getting rid of a lot of people that would challenge (or maybe did challenge him in the past). I'm not privy to a lot of that but I do know people. Someone who does that is acting out of fear. My advice to those looking to work here. Don't. Unless you want someplace that you can settle down, do very little work and not be noticed, this is your place. Otherwise, if you want challenge, ability to speak your mind, and management support. And like another reviewer said, go work somewhere else