Pros
- The benefits are very good and the pay is above-average. For someone looking to ride out the last few years of their career until retirement, it’s a great place to end up. Benefit's package offers ALL the options -- the partners want Cadillac Care, which means they have to offer it to all employees. Fringe benefits of being in the IT department are nice (company provided cell phone, company provided laptop, etc.). - Stability. You're not a contractor, you're an actual company employee in an actual internal IT department. You have the same schedule and the same commute every day. It's pretty much an 8-5 job with occasional (rare) attention needed if some kind of emergency happens on a weekend. - "Macro" Management. As long as you do the job and don't let things get out of control, leadership will pretty much leave you alone. Figure out a system that works for you, make sure you're not letting anything slip through the cracks, and then execute. You technically have a supervisor -- somewhere, in another office -- but on a functional, day-to-day basis, you are your own supervisor. - Work space. It's different for each office, but there is a cultural precedent that the IT tech in each office is going to have their own office (which is spacious by cube-farm standards) with a work bench.
Cons
- There is no career path for someone in support. Come in, fix problems, go home, repeat forever. There are people who have been working level one support for 10+ years without a promotion. When Senior or Supervisor positions come open, they're almost always filled by an external hire. - Being assigned to a small office is a career-killer. Advancement opportunities are already a rare thing in the IT department, and if you're not in the Chicago or Oakbrook Terrace offices, you have no access to high-level players in the department. - The job is actually less technical than ever. Ten years ago the job was maintaining local servers, hardware repairs, light networking, etc. Now the job is to answer phones and shuffle tickets all day. People trying to move on are routinely told by other companies that their time at GT has not gained them any significant technical skills. - Metrics for the entire year are announced at the halfway point and retroactively applied. Content of yearly reviews can be blatantly incorrect, but ultimately has little to do with your final score anyway. Leadership knows who they’re grooming and who they’re not, and they fudge the numbers to make the reviews match what was decided behind a closed door in roundtable “discussions”. - There is a work-hard-play-harder corporate culture. Most rank-and-file accountants are fresh out of college or in their early to mid-twenties, so the preferred method to unwind is heavy drinking. Most people never intend to stay in public accounting for any more than a year or two, so turnover is constant, making it very hard to have any kind of work acquaintances – as soon as you get to know someone, they quit. - Anyone who is not an accountant is a 2nd class citizen. I really can't stress this one enough. It is commonplace to not be invited to some recreational events or social gatherings because they are for "Pro[fessional] Staff Only". - Leadership wants to use the internal ticketing system -- which was designed for CRM -- as some kind of metrics tool. Close out 200 tickets and you look SUPER BUSY, even if it only took you 5 minutes. Close down three tickets and people just assume you aren't doing anything, even if you were working all day. - It's really just a matter of time until that shiny new call center in India starts replacing US support staff. Leadership already forced an (unwanted) telephone help desk on everyone a few years ago. The infrastructure is in place, they just have to change where the phones ring. When that day comes, it'll be pink-slip-o-rama.