Pros
If you've got the people skills and find the opportunity to get the face time with management, you can really go far with that company. A lot of the people really care about what they do, and want to make it a great place to work. The majority of the upper management were people who really made me feel like part of a family. In ten years, I felt challenged, but not overburdened. There were times that I was stuck in positions where it seemed like I was underutilized, but not for more than a year or two until I could move into something much better.
Cons
If you're stuck working nights/weekends/grunt work, or you're more technically oriented than a social butterfly you'll find yourself stuck in the same place for years on end. There is an unfortunate myopia to their hiring and compensation practices though, which leads them to miss out on good candidates, and an inability to keep talent when faced with the challenge of paying them what the market can offer. In numerous conversations with directors, vice presidents and the president himself, I often heard the same argument that they couldn't afford to pay more than what was the going rate for the Toledo area, but in the same breath they would claim they needed to attract the best and brightest from around the world. Sadly, as intelligent as John Martin is, and as good as he is at digesting the market and culture of the businesses around Telesystem, I feel like he'd be a much more valuable player in a position where he wasn't making snap decisions about the future that the products and lines of business that company will take. There have been too many meetings where the majority of attendees sit silently because they don't want to be snapped at by him, or say the wrong thing just to quickly be told they're wrong because John had another line of converastion all ready to get into.
