Pros
Core BTS employs some excellent people. Some of the smartest people in the IT field who work super hard to take care of their customers and their teammates. Middle management is also good in some areas, and they do the best they can to support their employees, especially considering the lack of support from upper management, HR, and finance. Decent location in Madison. Local Madison leadership were prepared for Covid and navigated moving to work from home very well.
Cons
Benefits are poor and have only trended downward. Everyone I worked with who had a spouse that could provide health insurance went with the spouse's. 401k contributions were ended by the company to weather the financial impact of Covid (and yet they still had enough money to buy a company, while keeping 401k contributions at 0%). Wages in Madison are not at all competitive. As a manager, the best hope was that your employees didn't shop around and realize how dramatically underpaid they were. Recruiting was a challenge due to the complete inability to compete with the likes of CDW. Raises are nearly impossible to obtain and Core would rather lose top performing and excellent employees rather than grant a small increase. Sales has complete control of the company and free reign to make major decisions, such as selling and going live with services and products that are not supported leading to technical resources suddenly finding themselves asked to support a tech or solution that is totally unknown. After the service is live and being paid for, of course. Sales also dictates the pricing of the services they sell. This is good for customers, as Core is willing to sell at bargain prices to land agreements, but bad for actually providing funding to properly support said services. Upper management and Finance are not going to invest in a service with -50% margin, but that's the task, and that's what was contracted. This should not be considered ethical, but it is the standard practice. The financial issues extend to headcount as well. Technical teams are understaffed and entire functions can go unstaffed as employees quit and aren't replaced for potentially years. Management and support positions (basically anything not generating revenue) especially are treated as "nice to have" instead of business critical. There is zero investment, interest, or support for any sort of diversity or outreach. It is not uncommon in IT, but Core is a white man's environment. They have the opportunity to try and change that, but there is no interest. Any volunteer or charity work is purely for promotional purposes and will not be funded unless it's functions as an advertisement first and primarily.