Vantaggi
These are the pros and cons of working on each area in Sabre: Sales Pros: You have license to be as rude and arrogant as you want. You can over-promise and nothing will come back to you (no accountability). Low stress and enough budget to entertain customers. Plenty of travel. Cons: Contract, addendums, product descriptions, brochures, demos etc… are not your responsibility. These are own by the Marketing organization. Good luck getting quality from them. Marketing and Solutions Management Pros: This organization is understaffed. Grossly understaffed. So it’s not likely that the multiple lay-offs will affect you. Cons: Everything else. You are told that you are the “CEO of your product” but in reality you are the janitor of your product. You work all day and all night. You have to keep apologizing to the customer. You never have enough budget to make a decent product. You have to support the Sales organization and Customer Care, so you become as tactical and short-term as possible. You are dragged by the weight of your development team. Development Pros: You can get two promotions per year. Your salary is good. You provide your own estimates and nobody is smart enough to challenge them. Also zero accountability. You can change your mind in the middle of a development and overrun your project. No worries. Not your fault. Cons: You are a line item in a cost spreadsheet. So if the product runs out of budget you are the first to be laid off. You may be a contractor here. If that’s the case you may take forced vacation by the end of the year. PMO Pros: You can work from home 5 days per week and nobody will notice. Cons: You are not really a Project Manager in the sense of planning an executing. In fact your only role is to do multiple “reports” for upper management and chase people up to request status. You are like a pit-bull and your boss will tell you to keep on biting every day. For the people doing the work you are just a nag. Delivery Pros: You get to learn from the customer first hand. When implementing a new product you learn a great deal about its functionality and the problems of the industry. Cons: Since most products are half-baked your interactions with customers are harsh. If you are an idiot (not uncommon) you’ll bring back that bad vibe into the company. You’ll be mean and fight with the rest of Sabre just to fulfill the whims of a small airline. Everyone will hate you for being mean.
Svantaggi
The problem with Sabre is very simple: overpromise. Back when the company went public, the promise to stake holders was a YoY growth that is very aggressive. That number is not achievable. The clowns responsible for that mess have cashed out and are millionaires now. Today the new executive team is unable to grow the business to that expectation. So they have surrendered control to the finance organization and the only thing they know is to cut costs in a desperate attempt to meet target numbers (hence the multiple lay-offs per year).