Pros
Good pay, generous bonus program
Health insurance is pretty good
Profit sharing contribution to retirement every year in addition to regular 401k match
Strong financial outlook for the company
Cons
Over reliance on vendors/contractors. Over the years, IT leadership has outsourced so much of our technical knowledge to where vendors can extort us for any dollar amount. Even my own team is not immune from this. I always have to deal with vendors to do most work on the applications that our team is responsible for. I have a lot of knowledge about our applications and how Entergy uses them but I always feel like I have one hand tied behind my back dealing with the vendors.
They've been redoing all of their project startup and PMO processes with a consulting firm over the last few months and it's going terribly. I've attended all of the trainings and the information that they've provided gives us no guidance on what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to do it. The consultants that do this training name drop the CIO all the time during the trainings and working sessions almost like it's a threat (apparently the owner of the consulting firm and the CIO are old friends). I asked my manager if we could just use the old process since we already knew it but was told that we could not. It kind of feels like they're going to outsource the project managers and the PMO again just like it was years ago when I first started here, so that'll be one more thing that we're stuck with dealing with a vendor on.
The company has a lot of really good growth potential right now with all the data center work happening in our region, so maybe this has something to do with this, but it seems like IT is constantly doing re-orgs. I've been lucky to have not been too directly affected by them other than our group reporting to a different VP, but a lot of my friends on other teams feel like they're constantly getting passed around and a lot of people are starting to question whether the CIO and his lead team actually know what they're doing.
They introduced an initiative earlier this year for all of us to come up with ideas for ways to cut down on hours of labor using AI. The leadership team is framing it as a way for us to free up time to work on other things, but with all of the news about companies laying people off because of AI, most of my teammates assume that these efforts are setting the stage for them to do that to us too.
Teams often feel like we're working against each other and not with each other. The team I'm on gets along great, but there is constant finger pointing between application teams, infrastructure teams, networking teams, security teams, project managers, etc. And the sad thing is that the managers, senior managers, and directors are the worst at it. They do a horrible job of leading by example.