Great Engineering & Technology with a Horrific Work / Life Balance and Major Cultural Problems
Pros
The IC level engineers were a group of brilliant and hard working folks. I really valued everyone on my team and enjoyed working with the other technology teams. There was a lot of investment in technology and we spent our time on interesting problems and financial support for solving those problems. Flexibility on work from home, travel, and PTO policies. Salary was very good (but ultimately still not high enough to be worth the stress)
Cons
There are some truly awful leaders in key executive positions with terrible behavior patterns. Passive-aggressive communication, unprofessional conduct, and a lack of respect for employees was rampant and lead to multiple HR complaints and major churn among both ICs and leaders. My boss also attempted to intimidate myself and others from sharing information with _his_ boss. A couple of these leaders regularly publicly criticized teams while still in the middle of live troubleshooting. Zero concept of work-life balance - with multiple "sev. 1" outages often occurring each day, critical infrastructure components outsourced to a disastrously implemented IBM contract, and a large India footprint, the infrastructure was a 24/7/365 dumpster fire leading to enormous conference bridges with 40 or 50 employees on them around the clock. Employees were under heavy pressure to sit on these conference bridges on nights, weekends, and holidays even if they had nothing to contribute to the call for the sake of "optics". In spite of its size, R1 is very procedure averse - so executive leaders often call every name they can think of in a panic with no regard for who is responsible or on-call. I expressed concern that my team was suffering from severe burnout and told "Haha, welcome to R1." Ultimately followed the path of several others before me and resigned with no job lined up.