AT&T

Compensation can be decent by industry standards, though if you're a talented engineer, you will almost always be chronically underpaid.

Some teams enjoy good work-life balance.

Some teams are working with newer technologies, spreading better software practices throughout the company.

I've worked with many great people here, although the overwhelming majority of them leave within a few years.

First and foremost, AT&T is a highly unstable company by nearly all parameters. Reorganization is very common and has happened frequently over my five years here. This means you may regularly lose progress and, by extension, recognition as your job role and managers are shuffled towards whatever initiative upper leadership has.

You can never trust location expectations. Over the years, I've seen people hired remote, then forced into an office under threat of termination. I've seen people move after being told to go to a certain office, followed by them then getting forced to a different office, so they have the luxury of either terminating their lease or driving extended distances.

Currently, the company has returned to a phase (which they've come to and from several times even before COVID) where they're forcing everyone to return to the office and also closing all but four hub locations. Hired remote in one state years before COVID? Well, now you can move or be terminated.

The technology is largely out of date, and every initiative to improve it just leads to half-measures that connect spaghetti code to new platforms, which multiplies costs for little improvement or even worsened performance. Acquisitions are frequently half-merged before getting sold off again, adding more spaghetti to our systems as a result of often irreversible data migrations.

Executive leadership is terrible for all the aforementioned reasons and the fact that, after all this effort, their stock continues to plummet. This company has murdered any reputation it had as a stable place to grow your career, while simultaneously providing no incentives for engineering talent to join and polish their skills.

First and foremost, stop playing with employees' lives. The company has been hemorrhaging talent for years, and it's a skeleton crew of competence making any of the positive improvements you see from the company. The current return to office push is causing further damage in this department, and it's already a struggle in many departments to find people with a strong knowledge of the services.

Second, focus on improving core services and using technology to reduce costs, instead of just pushing headfirst into a random new initiative every year that wastes a ton of money with no benefit. Listen to your engineers! Many of them are well aware of where the leaks are, but upper leadership always thinks they have a solution. The stock price doesn't seem to agree.