Pros
- I love the people I work with and the business I support - I get to travel about 30% of the time out of a given year - I get to work alone - We are a real team. Even though we all work solo around the country, we are constantly in-touch with one another, everyone cares, and everyone helps each other out. It's a culture you don't see everyday in a corporate environment. No one is out for themselves. High praise for this! - They hire smart. They seem to only want people with a college education, certifications, and experience in their fields. It is so nice to not be working among a bunch of high school dropouts or people with no motivation or ambition to do more or go further in life. - I am WELL compensated for my what I do - I make my own decisions about how to handle something and management supports it - I am trusted by my peers and upper management - You aren't bogged down with a bunch of unnecessary rules and regulations outside of what is status quo... such as SOX, PCI, etc. - I am empowered to do whatever is necessary to help people - We currently have an open checkbook to make certain infrastructure improvements - We are actively doing things to bring both companies into the 21st century.. at least on the IT side. I can't speak for the business practices.
Cons
- The network is a joke, but the person who manages our networks doesn't think there is a problem. We all walk on eggshells around that person. My connection at home is 100 Mbps, the connection for my office with 150 employees? 10 Mbps.. but that's okay... It's the number 1 complaint I get, but I have no influence over changing anything about that. - There could have been better communication about IT policies to our end users from upper management. Instead, lots of confusion on how to ask for help, put a ticket in, who to call, etc. I took it upon myself to inform my sites, but, it looks better when things filter from the top down. - Not everything is as it seems. One the surface, everything appears to be business-as-usual and happy-happy, joy-joy, but..... it's not. There is a lot of rifts and friction between both former businesses (Unisource and Xpedx), but I try to stay out of that drama as much as possible. I just nod my head and listen to their complaints, but it goes no further than me. Mergers are never fun and can be filled with a lot of uncertainty, but you have to know how to ride the waves or you'll drown. - The merger happened, but besides the announcement of unifying our billing/ordering systems, no other real infrastructure announcements. It's VERY quiet at the top and in the middle.