Pros
One of the best things about working at Kaplan is the location. You're right around Columbus Circle near the edge of Central Park. It's very beautiful in the warmer months. You know there is a problem when this rates as one of the BEST reasons to work at an employer.
Cons
This place will suck the life out of you. As a "System Engineer" you will do weekly code pushes for the development along with putting out fires. They call it System Engineering, but really its more like Operations. It's the most mind-numbing work I've ever had. The management there is shady. During the tech downturn in the early 2000s they increased the work hours from 9-5 to 9-7. I guess they figured that if you didn't like it, you would leave on your own and they wouldn't have to give you any severance pay. The hours were scaled back to 9-6 about 8 months later and remain there. The environment is a joke. It is full of decaying hardware and software. Many "Mission Critical" applications are on Solaris 2.5.1. I recently had to build a copy of one of these machines and found it funny that I was applying Y2K patches in 2006. Other than the Solaris 2.5.1 machines you have mostly a Linux environment where fires are a daily thing. You can easily spend 3 days a week doing nothing but putting out fires. No one has any time to re-architect the environment so that the fires don't happen in the first place.
