if you're a technology professional and love working with upto date technology, you can stop right now and take my advice: stay away from this company.
Teranet is not a technology company. If it could run a paper-based system with 0 ppl, it would change to that in a heartbeat. Here's how you can get a sense of the company's culture: the company is run by non-technology people.
The CEO is a former civil servant/bureaucrat. I was once invited to give a technology presentation and I noticed that the CEO was bored out of his mind with absolute zero interest in what I had to say - which was something that had really excited IT folks. His only interest was if this could lead to a cut in the headcount numbers. He wanted to be anywhere but listening to my presentation.
The CFO's primary concern is to manage risks arising from the consequences of leveraged buyouts. On top of that, every dime, nickel, or penny of profit has to come-off the balance sheet right away because the all-holy pensions need to be funded. So there's no concept of investing profits back into updating technology.
Another reason for obsessing over antiquated technology mindset/culture:
Teranet belongs to the OMERS's infrastructure portfolio. If you look at other companies in this portfolio you will see companies like Bruce Nuclear Power Plant, the Eurostar High Speed railway track in Britain, confederation bridge linking PEI and NB, London City airport, Port of Melbourne, etc. Notice something in that list: they're all traditional brick & mortar construction heavy things/items. Once-and-done. You pour all your investment money at the beginning and then reap the rewards for the next 25-100 years.
Teranet - which is supposed to be an information technology company - is run in exactly the same manner and with the same mindset. Since Teranet is run according to a traditionally constructed concrete infrastructure, the leadership abhors adoption of any new technology that doesn't lead to a direct cut in headcount numbers. The mentality is that a thing has been built and now for the next 25 years no new investments are to be made. Only if something breaks, then try to fix it ie bare-minimum maintenance. But the problem is that in information technology, everything changes every 2-3 years requiring adoption of newly discovered technology at a much faster pace than traditional infrastructure constructed with concrete or physical materials. So if you love old-style IT - like EJBs, Java based MVC, monoliths, etc. then this is the company you should work for.
And existing technology professionals make decisions that are short-sighted and antiquated. An example -
When a new application was being architected in early 2010s, an architect rejected the use of REST/JSON as a communication protocol because they deemed that it wasn't "secure enough". so the company stuck with EJBs and Weblogic. Now imagine developing an application that uses EJBs and RMI in 2015. Who does that? absolutely mind-boggling.
