Pros
- great work/life balance as a salaried corporate IT worker. Most IT managers don't monitor your hours worked and trust that you will get the job done - Decent change management process - Average technical opportunities. If you can get the right management you'll have the opportunity to try new things and grow. Other managers are not interested in innovation, however, and always want to go with the traditional Microsoft/IBM stack, which can be extremely limiting - Decent recognition of high performers - Good compensation in terms of salary, 401k, paid time off (25 days to start!), and health benefits - Nice offices, good parking, good cafeteria, good gym, nice campus - good help desk (i.e. trouble ticket) and desktop support. The staff on that front always responds fast and generally gets things fixed with the appropriate sense of urgency
Cons
- Lots of politics on the business side, which then bleeds over to the IT side. It's really demoralizing to spend so much time trying to win arguments and cover your own butt for fear of being the one left holding the live grenade at the end of a project - Awful technical training. We complain about it on each employee survey but the IT training staff is obviously incompetent - Crappy HR. Time off system is horrible and navigating the HR structure for help is a painful experience - lots of dead weight overall, many substandard employees hiding in the bureaucracy - The IT infrastructure teams (Oracle, Websphere, storage, network, unix/linux, etc) are awful right now. Even simple upgrades are a crapshoot. Many, many hours are lost simply reacting to botched updates or simple installs - There is no real audit in terms of project benefit. Most IT workers feel like the projects are selected randomly and that no one tracks the benefits after they go in.