Pros
-Good salary, good compensation (401K and health plan in particular) -Nice cafeteria with healthy food -Beautiful surrounding area with a good walking path -It's very easy to hide. You can easily get away with doing nothing for a good long time. I spent, like three months, doing no work, turning nothing in. And no one noticed. Of course, that could be a con if you like making connections--it means no one's paying attention to you. -Good work-from-home policy. No one bats an eye as long as you put it on the calendar. I get about 10 notifications per day from people working from home. I've never been chastized for it, or seen a restriction need to be regulated.
Cons
What you get out of working there depends on what kind of person you are. I wish I could be more negative, but really, UHG is so big everyone's going to have a different experience. But here's mine. From what I saw, they put more attention on managers and decisions-makers than those who do the grunt work. And there are managers everywhere (it's managers all the way down). Your boss will spend more time looking up at his or her manager, making sure they approve, than down at their employees making sure they have what they need. They don't have to deal with IT problems when it takes days just to merge your two lines of code into master because of something eight levels removed. My team was way too big for an Agile methodology. In-office developers alone, there were 24 of us. You can't have a stand-up meeting with that many people. And that's not counting QAs or BAs. The software is EXTRAORDINARILY complex and tightly coupled. The main branch often breaks because it's so tightly coupled so someone can easily commit something that breaks it for everyone. They adhere so tightly to Agile Scrum, but don't say "no" to the hard decisions (e.g. regularly booking way over capacity, two week iterations that don't improve the product, but make it so those managers know what to expect so they can tell their managers). Nothing is spelled out, there's operational knowledge in scattered people's brains everywhere. Creativity is not valued. By the time you get a spec to implement (which, good luck to know where your marching orders come from each day) it's been so finely tuned it's basically in pseudocode at that point. Their policies are dictated by out-of-touch managers six levels up. For example, no one has a personal space. You're expected to clear it off every end-of-day. This is so you can take your laptop anywhere to converse with others. Except A) most people need something of theirs to keep at their desk, like a keyboard rest or special chair or coffee mug B) you can't get to know anyone if they always sit in a different place. You only know them by names, not faces or location. How are you supposed to get to know anyone if you can't find them? So you end up using e-mail or IM for everything, even if they're right next to you. They say they care about employees, but make no effort to make personal connections to them. I've been confronted with certain actions that were based entirely on hearsay evidence and the "no one else seems to have a problem figuring this out" deal. I've literally never had a conversation with my team leader (and I've had three in the 2 years I've been there. Four if you count having "no manager" for three or four months). And therefore I have no interest in pleasing that person. Everything is by e-mail. Policy changes, organization changes, team get-togethers, all by e-mail. A team lunch can have 23 people. How are you supposed to get to know anyone in that capacity? Every year they post a workplace survey, and bug everybody to complete it, but I've never seen anyone change based on it. I was on the survey team one year and I saw point after point ignored. They even said they ignore the comments. Other: -Open-plan office makes you feel anxious and watched. I always feel like my job is in peril. Lighting comes from skylights or dim flourescents, like a warehouse. -The free coffee is bad. I mean, it makes me sick. Makes me feel like there's a brick in my stomach. But you can always buy from their company coffee shop. -Lots of contractors and consultants. You never know who's who or when they're going to disappear. Goodbye subject matter experts. -Their technology policies are oppressive and dictatorial. They have an oppressive proxy you can't get around (meaning no YouTube, no Instagram, no Pinterest). You can't install any unauthorized software--they have a special program that monitors for it and an "appStore" that does all the installations from approved applications automagically. So if you like OpenOffice better than Word, you're out of luck. You're not allowed to use Chrome, you have to use IE or an old version of Firefox. -No advancement whatsoever. I don't know how you're supposed to get noticed in this job, unless you're just charismatic.
