Vantaggi
Close knit, family type environment. Very diverse workplace in IT - proud to be amongst people of various backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures. It’s not just one demographic or gender that dominates teams in IT. Great work life balance - most management is flexible and accommodating for personal and family matters. Even before COVID, some teams even supported work from home schedules. Benefits and time off (floating, personal, sick, vacation) days are excellent. A lot of office perks for Arlington locations - fun, social environment, work events, raffles, free coffee, ample parking, etc. IT is going through a major transformation - QA in particular. Culture change agent VP came in a few years ago to shake up the organization to move it forward with the industry and move the team from manual to a more technical automation test team (SDET roles). Ongoing initiatives have been put in place to upgrade or “modernize” archaic financial software. My observation is that there is a minority of people who are actually on board and share this vision, so it’s a plus if you like change, learning new things, challenging yourself, keeping your technical skill sets sharp, relevant, and up to date and are forward thinking. It’s a great place to utilize and hone in on a lot of the industry standard technology and practices out there today. IT in general has a lot of great talent. You’ll work with a lot of sharp, knowledgeable, and smart teammates.
Svantaggi
Pay is below market rate. I accepted a pay cut when I joined. IT lost a lot of people due to this same issue. Management will retain a lot of good people if they pay them equitably. 401k and bonuses are ok but could be improved. Not a lot of people are on board with the IT transformation, particularly in QA. I think it’s because it’s the deep rooted culture that’s been ingrained in a lot of the long term employees. It’s old school mentality and systems thinking. Most have been complacent and comfortable over the years - you can see it in the non technical management and staff who still haven’t invested time in improving their technical skills, even though the VP’s and up have been giving the team a few years to get up to speed. This “systems thinking” prevails - people want to be spoon fed, they want templates and processes, they are not used to having to learn new technologies or doing things differently. When I joined, I got the feeling that most team members were there to just earn a paycheck, stay with GMF until they retire, and do exactly the same job they started out doing years ago. This resistance to change will prove challenging for IT to move forward. IT and QA have already lost a lot of people who either jumped shipped because they didn’t want to move forward or were unhappy with the way change is being done. COVID didn’t help matters any so a lay-off was inevitable. Not the most stable place to be at at the moment. Lastly, there is a lot of cronyism and favoritism. - office politics are everywhere. There are a few bad apples in every bunch, but these apples are able to get away with so much - I’m talking flagrant HR violations - just because of who they know.