Dynamic Environment with Leadership in the Weeds
Pros
Teradata is a truly dynamic environment full of chaos and complexity. While this comes with a downside, it's also fantastic opportunity for young, hungry professionals to dive in and learn. There aren't a lot of boundaries in our work (i.e. we aren't stuck in a proverbial box or job description), but we are expected to solve world hunger with limited resources. The downside is that it's a sometimes overwhelming environment because we lack the time for anything other than on-the-job, reactive learning and find ourselves executing by "pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps."
Cons
The organization is quite political. Employees often find themselves doing a whole lot of reactive work in response to C-level requests. The C-suite is too concerned with the details, which perturbs many of the extremely bright people that work here. If the leaders led with inspiration and trust (and less politics/ego), this would be a vastly different place. There's a lot of hedging that goes on at the top, where leaders come across as they have it all together and are on track to meet their objectives, when in all actuality their teams are silently suffering beneath high-volume workloads out of fear that bringing up concerns will lead to negative political consequences. The communication is lacking to the fullest degree; it's definitely a situation of management believing the front line people can read their minds and false assumptions that things trickle downhill organically. We make a ton of changes in our business (strategy, naming convention of products and teams) and don't communicate them, and it leaves everyone feeling extremely confused. We spend so much time trying to figure things out that we can't get our work done. Depending on what team you're part of, work life can be awful.
