Pros
The company had a good amount of events for its employees, and would bring in food fairly frequently. The insurance part of the benefits package was also very good. And for those coming in from the Chicago suburbs via the Metra, the office is very short walk away from the stations.
Cons
Management has never had much of a taste for IT projects getting done right, just for them getting done fast. This has resulted in a lot of systems instability over the years. Everyone is more than happy to complain about this, but no one with the authority ever wants to designate any time to actually fixing these problems, either retroactively or going forward. Though this was not as much of an issue around the time I left, management determining deadlines based on how long they feel a project should take to complete without ever consulting the people actually doing the work on the project or having any knowledge of how long the work actually takes to perform, was basically the sole contributing factor to the negative perception of the IT department to successfully deliver projects. To be fair, these not necessarily unique problems to this company. However it's extremely frustrating when there is as much complaining about this as there is, yet no one is willing to pay the price to rectify the root problems. If not for a 2015 change in IT management, my complaints would have ended there. The IT department had enjoyed a very good system of trust with the previous management, including nice perks like being to work from home a reasonable amount, as long as that privilege was not abused. After all, you don't often want to have to take a paid day off for something like an hour long dentist appointment. There are also days when you're not feeling well but can still work, and don't want to be inconsiderate enough to infect others in the office by coming in. One of the first actions the new management took was to explicitly get rid of this policy without exception, only to discretely return it to a select few in a very inconsistent manner over time. If that were the extent of the changes brought on, it would hardly even be worth mentioning. New management proved themselves on several different occasions to be utterly unsympathetic and uncaring to any their employees, going so far as to even demand work be done on emergency days off taken on behalf of ailing family members. Not to mention the complete lack of understanding of the idea of actually needing to take an emergency day off (despite HR policy having a pool of time off allotted for just this purpose). They seemed to believe that life could be completely planned and scheduled at least two weeks in advance in every single case. They had a very clear vision of what the technological future of the company should be, but the issue is that there was absolutely no recognition or attempt at understanding what was there today. Whenever a problem would occur and they would demand to know the exact reason why, they would repeatedly be shocked over being told the truth about what a particular server setup or application architecture was at present, even though they'd been told about it and had it documented for them several times already. It is a good thing to have a vision for the future, but it takes time and resources to get there. So the present cannot just be ignored in favor of this vision. Along those same lines, they were so out of touch with what their employees were actually working on, but were more than happy to pass swift judgement on said employees when a snag was encountered. In trying to diagnose a specific web application issue, another developer and I were up until 11 PM the previous evening. When we brought up the issue to management at a meeting the next morning, we were told that we needed to "get more serious" about solving this, despite making it known that we were up late the previous night, and were continuing to work on said issue that day. Though perhaps this frustration came from us being up late fixing problems and not constantly learning more about our craft, which seemed to be another new management expectation. And I mean "constantly" more literally than you may think. It's obviously a part of a developer's job to spend some of his or her own time learning new things about their craft, but there must be a balance. If there is no understanding for that, then compensation must be adjusted accordingly. Lastly is the belief that under-qualified offshore consultants could solve everything. In one particular project of urgency, the solution was to bring in a low priced offshore consultant that claimed to specialize in the technology that we needed some help with. The reality is that this consultant knew little that technology, and ended up having to get his hand held by internal staff most of the time. Management refused to take any action on this even after being informed about it, until another manager (one much closer to the project) also prodded them about it continuously. The solution was to replace that consultant with another one, who was at best only slightly more qualified. Others in the organization simply continued to ask why this project didn't seem to be getting off the ground.
