Pacific Life reviews

PL is a case study in nearly every IT cliche imaginable: -Bad blood between business and technology that you'll get caught up in the politics of? Yep. -Business running off and signing multi million dollar software contracts without talking to IT, and then blaming IT when it's not going well? Yep. -Agile-in-name-only (consistently being asked to present your fully refined sprint backlog for the next 12 months)? Yep. -Poorly thought out gutting and outsourcing that management continually doubles down on instead of reflecting on their mistakes? Yep. -Siloed organizations within IT so far apart that you can't be sure if you dreamed about them or if they actually exist? Yep. -Management thinking that the solution to literally any problem is throwing money and fresh contractors at it without even taking a second to think about what caused the problem in the first place? Yep. -Critical production issue support tickets dropping into a black hole to never be heard from again (and then get told it's a feature of the support system, not a problem when you try to follow up)? Yep. All that and then you realize that PL is less than 5000 employees total. The company is extremely siloed and overbearingly bureaucratic, but has exactly no accessible documentation on how to accomplish anything. You are just expected to know every process intuitively (or I guess find the documentation on a private Sharepoint site?), and you'll sure get angry emails when you mess up. Management's response to complaints about bureaucracy was to institute pre-processes in front of the existing processes, nailing their implied goal of making everything take even longer and be even harder to do. In summary, if you're trying to write a book about everything that can go wrong with an IT organization, I'd fully recommend spending a year or two here. Otherwise I'd really recommend opting for anything else.