AT&T

Pay, benefits, educational opportunities, interesting technologies

AT&T is going through an extensive transformation from an old telco to a new, cutting-edge, fully virtualized network and entertainment service provider. Much of the company is still in the old mindset... you don't want to work in any of those parts of the company.

Would have been 5 stars, but the company is VERY NEGATIVE about work-from-home arrangements. If you can get a work-from-home arrangement, it comes at the cost of accepting that your career is dead and you will never be allowed to advance beyond a second level. In fact, this is true even if you work out of an AT&T office, unless it is one of only a handful of designated "collaboration zones" in the United States.

The company has made a decision to cluster its workforce into just a few locations. If you're not in one of them, your career is effectively stalled in place, and you are in constant risk of being laid off or outsourced regardless of performance. This decision to cluster workers into a few zones has, in many ways, crippled its ability to host highly productive distributed teams. Teams now tend to do all their communicating face-to-face with those they're co-located with. This has caused what was once very effective communication within distributed teams to break down. Areas where fewer team members reside suffer as a consequence, and thus so do their career opportunities.

Stop shunning the distributed team model and instead apply investment to enabling distributed teams to communicate as effectively as co-located ones.