Vantaggi
1. People almost never get fired once you're emplaced. Job security. 2. Collaborative Culture 3. Folks are generally very nice and personable 4. Senior Management is relatively easy to talk to and approach 5. You get to work close to books and reading, and meet interesting external partners 6. People generally have a good impression of your company, so you usually don't feel like a dirty hatchet man 7. Books 8. NLB is genuinely a very resource-rich organization that has a lot of pro-social elements that can benefit people 9. Libraries are beautiful ideas and spaces. 10. NLB is generally a very diverse and inclusive organization
Svantaggi
1. Deadweight colleagues in some critical chokepoints can make collaboration a swampy hellhole, especially if you're assigned bigger projects 2. Job stagnation--even if you switch roles, you might end up having to collaborate with the same problem teams or individuals--your work tends to cycle around administrative shenanigans that fit around arbitrary workplans from top-down instead of creative feedback from ground-up. Some say it's endemic to large organizations. I say people aim too low and that an organization that is centered around 'learning' can do better. 3. The marketing department has an iron-grip on a lot of public facing content and they're always understaffed, which makes the workflows an enormous pain. This stifles creativity and smother projects in the cradle. 4. Large-Scale projects often begin from badly understood/no data, and are committed to by senior members of the organization, while all the creative ideation, much of the REAL work, is left to juniors and their teams to 'make happen' 5. There is a severe 'yes-person' culture problem here, where the inclinations and preferences of bosses are prioritized over the courage to speak the truth to power and to wrangle better conditions for the teams who have to make someone else's dream happen 6. Operational Staff get shafted regularly by 'up-top' changes while being underpaid. The Public Libraries are the life and soul and raison d'etre (reason for being) for much of the organization, but they have so little autonomy over the initiatives that get thrust upon them. 7. Many teams and departments have low morale when it comes to projects, and there's a large swarth of 'let's just get it done because someone in senior management wants it done' sentiment. 8. You will likely find that your team leaders and above end up mutilating ideas or projects to conform to the expected desires or expectations of bosses instead of fighting to truly innovate. There's a lot of repackaging instead of reimagination. 9. Manpower.is.always.an.issue. 10. Bosses are not creative. 11. Did I mention that there's a lot of deadweight and 'lifers' who depend on others to do their work? 12. Learned helplessness--the belief that you can't really influence or control your environment meaningfully--is endemic