Pros
I worked here for nearly a year, and had positions in two different departments. I first started as a full-time employee in an entry level position in a department that was essentially a call center. The environment was fast-paced, the people were entertaining, and it had a kind of rewarding feel to finish the day when you got a lot done. They had a number of "employee reward programs" with varying levels of enthusiasm and involvement. I enjoyed spinning the wheel, the large Friday meetings, and Friday morning bagels. They do a decorating/costume contest for each major Holiday. My superiors in this part of the company knew how to motivate their workers very well, encouraged them to take on larger responsibilities, and helped get them involved. I actually really enjoyed my time at the company while I was on this side, and am still grateful for the experience. Also, the starting wages for this area are very good for what are essentially data-entry and phone-call based jobs. After a few months, I was transferred out of the large "open-office" departments and into IT (my manager went out of her way to help me advance in the company). In the first few weeks I learned quite a lot, and the department seemed open to ideas. The main difference between this department and all the others was the age of the people I worked with. Whereas I had previously been working mostly with people that were under 30 or 35, this department had an average age over 50. Everyone was nice and generally got along pretty well.
Cons
Despite my overall positive experience while working in the open-office area, there were quite a number of mentionable things that will probably haunt NFN for a long time. While I named a few "employee reward programs" that were enjoyable above, that is really the extent of the company policies that I would consider worth having. In fact, most of the company policies were eerily reminiscent of the poorly-thought, overly-strict list of rules that my RAs enforced back when I was living on-campus at college. Hence the title of my review. The PTO system they have seems to have been taken right out of a corporate playbook from the 1890s: rather than getting a set amount of vacation days, your PTO is accumulated by pay period. This creates a multitude of problems, one of them being you can't really plan vacations in advance because you need to strategically use PTO time over an extended period of time to accumulate enough days to do so. Furthermore, your sick time and vacation time both come from the SAME accumulated time. This means that if you do save up enough time for vacation and get it approved, if you get sick a few weeks before or after that vacation you may not have enough PTO time to take off for your health. Once you start taking unpaid days off, you are more likely to be viewed negatively by management. On top of that, add a Human Resources department hamstrung by terrible policies, miscommunication, and elitist attitudes. I remember a fellow employee hypothesizing that the policies were at a kindergarten level due to so many young people working there that needed "professional direction." In reality, however, the most likely reason for the archaic policies would be the high employee turn-over rate that creates a "revolving door" type feel. It didn't take me longer than just a week or two of working at NFN to notice the extremely high number of employee "restructures," a passcode that changed a minimum once a month (due to people getting laid off), and constant new hires. It didn't seem like there were very many people outside of upper management that actually seemed to want, or think they could have, a long-term career opportunity with NFN. Aside from their horrendous company policies, most of my criticism is aimed towards the IT department management, and the authoritarian vice-grip the CEO exerted on general processes. The company's ability to communicate business needs into technical specifications is, shockingly, in even worse shape then their policies. Unnecessarily complex bureaucratic processes prevent any meaningful attempts at actually improving anything! They use a programming language first created in 1959 and last updated in the early 2000s. I genuinely put effort into doing great work for my first few months in IT. Overtime, though, I grew extremely apathetic toward the whole situation. If it wasn't for my own prerogative, my entire experience in NFN's IT department would be wasted time. Additionally, from the very beginning of my time in IT I was caught in something of an unstated turf war between my immediate boss and his superior. At times this made it confusing on which direction to go in, as they were both attempting to slyly undermine one another. This is definitely NOT a place to go if you are an IT specialist seeking a good-paying, long-term, self-rewarding position.
