AT&T

Large budget, ample opportunities, culture of inclusivity, supportive of military service, and supportive of graduate studies. A large body of training material is made available.

Q messenger allows instant communication with anyone in the company.

Zero tolerance of those who create a hostile work environment.

There is a VERY strong push to drive down operational costs.

Inaccurate reporting. See advice section.

I liken it to living in a large family where the patriarch refuses to honestly address systemic problems. Instead, things are always "positive." I rely on outside news to learn about what is really happening in my company.

From a personal perspective, my job is excellent, but my salary is not great. $155,000 plus bonus. I have been promoted from sysadmin/dba to a senior architect, but I have never had a raise in 15 years except COL. My peers have had to move to other departments and back to obtain a raise.

Although there are yearly layoffs and reorganizations, there are still many FT employees that contribute very little and should be eliminated, but progress is being made.

Since Rick Felts retired, the Telephony Organization is now directing a previously ITIL-focused IT Organization. Let us see where this goes.

The VP and team responsible for implementing an initiative is also the team responsible with reporting the initiative's progress. This incentivizes them to downplay their failures and misrepresent the real cost or depth of a problem. Senior leadership is then presumably unaware of the actual situation.

Employee satisfaction surveys seem carefully crafted so as to prevent specific serious issues from being addressed and surfacing.

Although my team is great, I see the chaotic and ineffective work environment most IT employees live with. Nothing is perfect, but from 2010-2015, the merged company was able to bring thousands of IT systems to fruition on time and budget each year.

There was a justifiable effort to eliminate staff redundancy from the merged companies. However, the biggest failure has been the mismanagement of large-scale onshore staff reduction that shifts responsibilities from FT employees to overseas non-employees managed by TechM. The TechM workers come and go. Understandably, they have no loyalty to AT&T nor do they share the AT&T vision.

TechM will hire anyone. I have worked with individuals who do not know how to use basic office programs, and yet these people are given superuser access to our Unix systems and databases. This is scary, and it causes outages. These overseas contractors can break our systems, and we cannot audit their actions. These issues have been reported, but things move slowly, and contracts have already been signed. We either do not have a good contract, or contract management is not able to force TechM to hire qualified staff.

If a survey were performed, 90%+ of AT&T employees would confirm that TechM employees are unqualified and damage AT&T.

No matter how many meetings and how detailed the clarification provided, TechM just cannot get the job done. This disaster of a decision is not getting visibility, and hundreds, if not thousands, of projects are stalling and failing because of an unqualified outsourced IT staff. But I think AT&T will survive this. Eventually, the current VPs and CxOs will retire, and then it will come full circle, and we will insource again. Then, this outsourcing mistake will be corrected and word-spun as domestic job growth. Circle of IT life.