Good Pay and Benefits, Chaos in IT transformation failure
Pros
IT pay is good. Indianapolis is very affordable. People in Indianapolis are really nice. The company is making fantastic profits. Senior positions get huge bonuses (we're talking tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars) so if you are senior you are well paid.
Cons
The traditional c-level management that exists at Sallie Mae doesn't understand that the Agile Transformation failed. Their management did not educate themselves and did not change their core practices or approach. The MBA 80's/90's management style of leadershiops is woefully out of date with todays workers and economy. IT line workers are fully aware of the reasons for the failure and several have left. At each level of management, spin and manipulation is used to present a good sounding but untrue view of the level beneath them ('give me any chart that show up and right'). This leads to complete failure being seen and represented as complete success by C level management. Every few months the management in Delaware decides to move people around, destroying relationships. Each time this happens the folks who complain are labelled trouble makers who are also low performers. There is sharp and intensive criticism by both management and worker groups in Delaware and Indianapolis with each group asserting that the problem is with the other. This leads to a toxic and unproductive environment. To survive in this environment you need to need to be able to play politics well. Management is done by traditional fear and direction giving, which leads to independent thinkers leaving and 'follow orders' folks staying. Hiring is deceptive with management describing an environment that does not exist, leading to many hires going through an intense adjustment period in their first 3 months when they realize that is not true. With massive current profits there is little recognized need for change. This will change over the next 5 years because the opportunity for other banks to compete against the dysfunctionality that exists at Sallie Mae is huge. Many simple IT tasks that take a few minutes to perform take months due to massive process over-engineering. As a publicly traded bank there are countless reasons why the company needs security and privacy. Unfortunately compliance and security is allowed unfettered ability to deny or block anything regardless of the effect on modern agile development. It's a train wreck.
