Pros
1. Business understands transformation has to be led by IT. 2. Broad opportunities across many different IT and business departments. 3. Total compensation package includes many perks such as third-party employee discounts, health and wellness incentive programs, and internal perks rewards program.
Cons
1. Loyalty comes at a cost. The current leadership trend towards outsourcing carries zero thought to current employee loyalty. 2. Rampant professional insecurity from the top down drives costly and poor architecture decisions. Ferguson has fostered a culture of rewarding mediocrity and substandard performance. The direct output are employees that are literally trapped at Ferguson. They cannot go elsewhere and make the same amount of money. Their skill sets are no longer relevant and their desire to improve is negligent. Yet Ferguson is content to promote and reward those that don’t rock the boat. 3. Treatment of vendors is shockingly unprofessional. Ferguson has shown a clear pattern of misleading vendors during contract negotiations. To the extent vendors are not notified when not selected, ghosting vendors, and allowing vendors to hold bad contract decisions against Ferguson. Ferguson is in fact doing these exact same behaviors now in a major contract negotiation. Thankfully ex-employees no longer bound by a veil of secrecy can freely discuss the current and past tactics with these vendors, helping them to understand why their time has and is wasted. 4. IT leadership is structured to match an infrastructure led legacy organization yet Ferguson wants to be an app-driven organization. They are consistently letting infrastructure operations decisions drive future state. Whereas industry and direct competitors long ago realized the power of applications and restructure IT organizations to match. 5. On-prem data center 2.0 in the cloud was the result of Ferguson letting vendors drive design decisions that kept legacy technologies and products relevant. The poor choices made are now coming back to bear real and problematic integration challenges when trying to insert application centric development environments. 6. Security organization is either unable or unwilling, most often the latter, to entertain current and forward leaning technologies not part of the incumbent vendor product portfolio.