AT&T

Made some really good friends. It helped get my foot in the door in the software industry.

Left a lot to be desired, which motivated me to learn a lot in my free time outside of work.

Flexible-ish hours. It was very easy to schedule appointments and flex a few hours throughout the week. I've recently heard this has been limited to 15 minutes total for brand new employees now, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

Used to be really easy to work from home during bad weather conditions. Not sure if that will still be true for new hires.

Very little mentorship from senior employees.

They are either too busy with redundant meetings or don't have enough knowledge to actually help mentor.

Too many exempt employees work crazy hours (60+). For entry and junior level positions, you're often capped at 40 hours per week (which is an excellent pro).

This also discourages folks from staying long at the company because people don't like working 60+ hours.

Basically zero recognition for hard work. They do give decent bonuses for hard work, but the low salary and benefits don't make up for it.

Most higher-ranked people are only at that level because they've stayed so many years at the company; it's not skill-based.

It's very easy for an entry-level employee with a little bit of initiative to become a "Subject Matter Expert (SME)" or to even act as a technical team lead just because so much of the senior staff is outdated/unmotivated.

Leadership doesn't trust employees, and employees don't trust leadership.

Focus on compensating your best talent. The best people have been leaving and will continue to. It's claimed AT&T is paying market rate, but that's not true for the even slightly above-average programmers. The better folks can easily leave for a 50%+ raise somewhere else (same city and all).

Stop the "brainwashing" tactics. Trying to convince your employees they're the "smartest" and "best of the best" doesn't help employees improve. It just causes underperforming folks to have large egos.

Hiring standards need to be increased a lot. Too many programmers were hired with little knowledge of any programming. Seems like a lot of them were hired because they were related to higher-ups.

If a team is struggling to meet deadlines, hiring brand-new kids out of college without any programming knowledge won't help a bit.

Get rid of/reduce the leadership hierarchy. It causes so many communication issues and pointless titles. Also, stop focusing so much on titles. Every time some little new technology comes out, it seems like middle management spends months thinking of new titles. Titles aren't important; compensation is.

Actually fire underperforming people. It may be considered expensive to fire underperforming people, but it's even more costly to lose your best talent due to wanting motivated peers.