Pros
Decent pay and benefits Large financially successful company Full tuition paid for classes and all degrees up to PHD. Doctorate is a substantial discount to employees. Nice work environment physically and good location. There is a big market for for-profit education companies and University of Phoenix is biggest--they are serving a market more efficiently than State universities.
Cons
Grew too much for too long without controls over political environment and headcount Performance review does not mean you are good or bad, it means --how well did your write your own review, and how well could you argue with your manager if you wanted a higher rating. IT Operations was a political fiefdom run very autocratically by the "King", that everybody bowed down to. The way this company did "layoffs" in IT was based solely on popularity and politics not performance and criticalit of the position or person. They also mailed out packages to the "laid off" people that included job title and date of birth and social security of all people in the "redeployment pool" (Hah!). This is pretty easy to figure out who is who and should not be in the package sent to each employee. It did not look like headcount controls were in place in IT--not in IT Operations anyway. It seemed like a good place to work, but it was toxic. The CIO had no strategy, roadmap, goals or priorities--imagine that in a company this size. Then when they got rid of the CIO, they threw out the baby with the bathwater--all the direct reports. IT was thrown in a bottle, shook up, and spewed out. The compliance group(s) were bureaucratic and spent hours making up work that does not need to be done, all in the name of "compliance'. They sent out communication to all employees frequently do this, don't do that, ... negative culture, too much of this, and polciies written like books to match this verbous police state mentality.