AT&T

Good technical opportunities, autonomy, and challenges.

Great but fading history of accomplishment.

A chance to work with some excellent people.

Large dependence on contract employees who are often given key project roles.

Good work-life balance.

Pockets of world-class excellence scattered throughout the company.

Reasonable pay levels for employees with sufficient years of service.

Good diversity.

The "elephant and the blind men" principle applies here. The very large size makes career advancement difficult to impossible.

There's sometimes an insular mindset and a tendency to overvalue knowledge internal to the company, making responses to technical challenges slow in the face of industry events. Acceptance of technical guidance from new or younger contributors is low.

Some teams are capable of nimble RAD and delivery, but most are bogged down by very onerous process constraints. Execution suffers at the altar of process.

AT&T tends to reward middle managers who do not rock the boat and who have organizational and political skills rather than domain or technical skills. Senior management is better, but is insulated from the "working level."

Technically skilled people do rise, but they have to have significant communications and presentation skills since MS Office is the only IDE they use. Relationships matter more than merit, but this is the culture.

Performance management evaluation criteria change yearly and do not matter greatly when bonus calculations are made. Promotions are not common, creating logjams of qualified candidates at every level in many organizations.

Improve communication.

Reward merit on both the management and technical career paths.