Pros
Premera IT used to be a fantastic place to work with smooth running, stable, mature Agile practices and teams of supportive people who loved working together and genuinely cared for each other. It was an environment built on trust and continuous improvement. It was a learning culture and there were opportunities to develop and grow. This is absolutely now no longer the case.
Cons
New leadership brought in their favorite colleagues from their former place of employment. It is a Boys Club. They are trying to model the IT organization based on that former employer. Premera is a health care organization not a software shop so this model doesn't work. They have done layoffs that have significantly impacted IT teams with engineers being forced to take on planning, QA and Agile responsibilities. These engineers are already overworked and now have additional responsibilities that take them away from what they love doing most - engineering and development work. The rate of delivery is still the same or greater which means that teams are even more overworked. IT is seeing a large volume of turnover as employees are disenchanted and leave. It is such a shame as there are still a lot of great people stuck there who are passionate about making healthcare work better. The culture is toxic and I saw several examples of Leadership forcing engineers to go against what is ethically right. There is a complete lack of transparency from Leadership. Q&A sessions and Town Halls are exercises in dodging the question and are all a smokescreen. Leadership is command and control with no oversight on the reason why they are making the decisions they are making and the value they are seeking. Work is deadline driven but is often derailed by Leadership when they stumble across the next new trend that they want to explore without thinking about the impact to delivery. That, and pulling engineers off to work on Tiger Teams further adds to the chaos.