Pluspunten
Depending on your department, you can get to work with some pretty cool people. The company makes an effort to keep in-house development software current, and internally we're laying the groundwork for revamping a lot of the code. I can't speak for every team, but for mine, there's not really any micromanagement involved, and the work/life balance and work from home policies are great as well. I've had the chance to learn under several great coders with a variety of specializations, each looking at the spaghetti mess from the prior era of the company, looking at it an actually planning on how they're going to fix it, then working diligently to fix it. Occasionally, the company holds some sort of break from work as well, something like a small fair with carnival games and a booth in the summer, numerous blood drives, et cetera. The coworkers are great, and even though I'm not rating this five stars, I have few regrets about most of the people I've had the pleasure of working with in the company.
Minpunten
Forgive me for being ambiguous for some parts of this, but pretty much all of this is going to boil down to "Ariel is creating a gloomy environment where many of us are expecting another round of layoffs," so I can't go too much into detail otherwise I'll state confidential information. Recently, Ariel Gorelik, the new CIO, announced to the that the company is going to be selling off and outsourcing some of its IT infrastructure, and consolidating some of its IT. Whenever he was asked about this, Ariel responded that those of us "good at our jobs" didn't have anything to worry about, but the whole time we were left in the dark as to HOW management was to evaluate us. Currently, the company asks that employees fill out timesheets through two programs, one per-project, and the other more or less per-department. However, in order to log our time for a project, the project head needs to add us to it, and since the system is designed to keep us in the dark, half the freakin' time we aren't made aware of who the project head is! What should take 15 minutes can easily drag into hours because of us requiring to relearn how to fill in a timesheet because Ariel found a new toy online and wanted to throw money at it. This was the same man who delivered a 100-member layoff last year, without explaining what evaluation they used, telling us that they were going to start evaluating us again, while reducing the size of IT, following the company going private. I had a coworker, sweet young lady who constantly gets yelled at by business because of that Wim Hovens quote, break down later that night and through the rest of the workweek until we talked about all of her worries, because she saw what was on the wall. I know people who quit months after the last layoff Ariel delivered because Ariel failed to make those of us that stayed confident in our futures with Amtrust, among them people whom I can't even say their titles of, for fear of inviting backlash against their professional careers. I still work with people, brilliant people, who are preparing to leave, or would happily sign up for a round of layoffs just because it means not waiting for the one afterwards. When I look at my workstation, I see men and women, both more powerful and smarter than I am, repeating what my own gut is telling me. Maybe in a couple years, this will blow over, but in the meantime, that weight of doom will be sitting with every pause in work, every second waiting for a business analyst to get back to me, every meeting, every elevator ride... every quiet moment... and whenever you're sitting there for 8 hours a day in front of a computer, you get a lot of quiet moments...
