Pros
I can't speak for other departments, only my experience in MIS. Acuity truly has a great company environment. On the whole, there is thoughtfulness behind benefits and facilities offered, and almost exclusively good spirit and morale among employees. The longer I work here the more I appreciate the attention to industry regulations, standards, overall business integrity, and generous local community goodwill, as well as the wisdom and long-term vision that seems to consistently put the company's competition to shame. That's the kind of reputation I'd look for in any employer: respect and wisdom. I'd also note that organizations seem to consistently take identity and character from the CEO down; Ben is among the best in both regards, and it shows. One improvement that's stood out in the past few years is more attention being given by MIS management to employee input in the teams new hires join and in existing employees transitioning to new teams.
Cons
As a programmer, there's something to be desired in workflow, tools, and environment. The number of hours put toward cumbersome, repetitive, tedious workflows is "a lot", and requires attention to detail that can be frustrating for team members who are highly qualified and feel like they're spending significant energy not programming. This has a lot to do with a waterfall project management philosophy that in fact puts the people writing specifications, who have no formal programming training and are declined from even benefiting from the company's continuing education reimbursement toward programming classes, in a separate department in a different part of the building. This is assuming a project actually has anyone writing specs -- programmers are at times taking shots in the dark with end users and crafting their own specifications. As an example of lacking tools, the specs themselves are maintained in Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. There is an additional disconnect between new hires who are entering with a relatively strong understanding of object-oriented programming, but no experience of Acuity's software, coming into systems that were built by legacy (though highly-experienced) mainframe architects and administrators with little regard to modern programming methodology. This imbalance can be daunting. In terms of team management, distribution of human resources is significantly imbalanced, with entire teams seeming to almost completely lack project work while others are strapped for programmers and seem to internalize a philosophy that everyone simply must put in noticeably longer hours.
