Pros
If you're in the IT industry in or around Alaska, there really isn't a better place to gain experience than AlasConnect. The number of technologies and different customer companies you work with is staggering. There are several different departments that offer unique experiences: helpdesk, desktop support, system administration, and software development. Regardless of where you started, hard work and legitimate interest would get you far. There was always A LOT to learn. If you wanted to do networking, you could do networking. If you wanted to do system administration, you could do system administration. If you wanted to do programming, you could do programming. The sky was the limit in terms of skill sets you could exercise. You just had to make sure you were up front about your interests early on and never stopped mentioning them. When I first started, the employees were some of the best people I had ever worked with. Technical skills were always important, but management valued the ability to learn and having a good attitude above all else. The talent pool in Alaska was relatively small, but they seemed to find good people. Your opinions were valued and management would take interest in your ideas for improving the company, though they didn’t always have the time or the resources to fully implement them. There's been a lot of change over the last few years, some of it for the good of the company, its employees, and its customers. The company has more than doubled in size since I started and is acquiring larger and larger customers every year. The pay is decent. The benefits are incredible; I've never found better benefits in Alaska. The retirement matching is ridiculously good.
Cons
This is my second time posting a review of AlasConnect. The first was much more positive than this one. Since I was the first reviewer and was honest about what I did for AlasConnect, it was easy for management to find out it was me. They pulled me aside and asked me to take it down. I was told if I took it down, "nothing bad would happen". I complied. This is totally within AlasConnect's rights (I assume), but it's incredibly shady. After this occurred, I felt much less safe or valued at AlasConnect. I was told "you can always bring up issues to us, but please don't post them publicly on social media". First, I brought up issues often and politely. They were almost always met with "once you're more experienced you'll understand". Second, I think the ability to openly review a company is not typical "social media", nor did any of my coworkers. This became a popular bit of gossip around the company; to be clear, I told no one about the situation. I was approached by a coworker saying "I just heard about the Glassdoor review thing, that's crazy". While AlasConnect was great in the beginning, it grew way too fast. The company had kept a status quo for many years and grew comfortable with it. The company was good at what it did: providing IT support to a certain group of businesses. All business must grow in order to succeed, but AlasConnect’s rate of growth starting around 2016 was ridiculous. Not a single person was able to keep up with it. Several years ago, AlasConnect was purchased by another company in a similar industry. This is technically public knowledge. At first, this seemed like the greatest thing in the world. After about a year or so of being bought, things got pretty bad. Management was forced to cater to the new parent company’s demands, regardless of how illogical. Management often ended up flying in blind to new customers and situations. New projects were taken on without completing old ones. It felt like getting new customers was often prioritized over fixing issues with existing ones. Long term projects for improving the company were often buried by the desire to please new customers no matter what. The massive growth was great, but the growing pains were not. High-growth periods are often accompanied by large amounts of stress. Certain groups within AlasConnect often received a disproportionate amount of flak. Most work relies on a few key individuals, so bottlenecks pop up quickly. Despite a large push for documentation and writing things down, much of the infrastructure is still only understood by a few people. During my time as a software engineer with AlasConnect, there wasn’t a single major software project that the team had delivered to AlasConnect, it’s parent company, or any of its customers. This was mostly due to poor management. There was already an entire working software stack in place, and my team was forced to abandon as much of that as we could and rewrite everything with relatively unknown and unproven technologies. Most of the technology and tooling choices were decided by one person purely because the people in management liked them or didn’t care enough to say “maybe we should reconsider this plan”. They were not chosen because they were the best tools for the job. The managers were also very prone to put down juniors and their ideas. Every single software engineer I worked with suggested other tools or technologies that they felt were a better choice; every suggestion was met with feigned interest and then pushed aside. Several employees at AlasConnect left in the few months before I did, and they echoed most of my opinions as well. Hopefully they write reviews themselves.
