Vantaggi
In the state of Alaska, there is no single place to grow your I.T. technical skills as fast as AlasConnect. Currently they have around 70 businesses they support across the country covering every industry--engineering, municipalities, accounting firms, ISP’s, power companies, etc. Technicians are encouraged even as interns to work hard and grow quickly, and there’s plenty of opportunity to touch new technologies in every field, every day. AlasConnect promotes internally more than any other company I’ve worked at, and values training their engineers up into positions over hiring from outside to fill a role. They also break down silos to eliminate buck-stops-here bottlenecks and require techs to be competent in multiple roles, so that they can own a project from start to end. AlasConnect’s upper management cares deeply about the company--if there’s an outage in the middle of a vacation, they’re out there helping to track it down along with whoever is on-call. That kind of support, especially from the top of the company is unheard of anywhere else. AlasConnect has phenomenal growth and has established itself with many long-term support contracts. It is a stable company with good financial management that has allowed it to weather the state’s financial troubles. AlasConnect’s management is always looking ahead to keep in front of the industry changes instead of stagnating with their current business model. AlasConnect, being IT people to the top of the company, is very willing to invest in proper hardware and redundancy for their internal systems and customer assets, a rare trait for an enterprise. Pay is decent but below average for the area, awesome benefits though.
Svantaggi
AlasConnect was purchased by MTA, a mid-size ISP in central Alaska a few years back. MTA is a highly metrics-driven company as opposed to a results-driven business model, and many of those policies have been forced down onto the AlasConnect technicians. Techs must account for the large majority of their time, which leads to things like administrative tickets to account for the time wasted accounting for time...which kills morale. This culture shift has also pit the “departments” against each other, and they now tend to play the blame game for existing customer issues instead of working towards a solution for everyone. AlasConnect has experienced explosive growth, but has stretched engineers beyond reasonable work hours weekly to accommodate the growth instead of hiring more staff or rethinking their support model. AlasConnect was saddled with being the financial prop-up for the aging MTA who was hit hard when competition came to their service area, and so they have to support their parent company as well as themselves. AlasConnect, like many older enterprises, frowns heavily on discussions of pay. Consequently, internal discussion revealed very large pay gaps for multiple positions--engineers making $20k less a year than technicians supposedly “lower on the chain”, etc. Pay rates are also decided by a separate management team than your direct supervisors, and your yearly review doesn’t have a greater or lesser impact on them, sometimes so little that the changes appear completely arbitrary. They also do not encourage negotiations at review or promotion time, and you are sometimes expected to fill a role above you at your current pay and benefits for a while before the title is given to you, if at all. They have no feedback process throughout the year. If you miss on one project in the spring, expect to hear about it in December at year-end review time, without feedback on how to improve.