CVS Health

Work from home is available when needed. It's a business casual environment where you can wear jeans.

The managers are really great and look out for their developers. If you have to work overtime on a project at an FTE, you usually get equivalent comp time to recharge and help work-life balance.

There are lots of development opportunities, especially if you are on the database/ETL side of things. There are lots of really good developers who are fun to work with, and it is overall a good place to work.

As with any large corporation or development pertaining to government regulation, there is a lot of red tape that you have to navigate around when it comes to actually getting things done. The deadlines are not very flexible, so if the business makes a mistake in the requirements or some roadblock halts project progress, it almost always means you are going to have to work in overdrive to get things in on time and on budget.

You will be expected to put in extra hours to meet deadlines and can get burned out, but this is par for the course in IT anyways. Sometimes it's easy and business as usual, and other times you need to step it up and work weekends or late at night to get the job done since the deadlines are usually not internal and are driven by the client.

Keep the developers developing projects and doing what they are specialized in, instead of forcing them into Business Analyst roles or making them do work that doesn't require developer-level expertise. This will keep your senior developers current on technology and able to produce results in application development. Senior developers get bored or underutilized when given work dealing with the business and sitting in meetings all day instead of building applications. This forces the company to rely on contractors with high turnover and a long learning curve to do the real development. Hire more business analysts who know how to flesh out the business requirements and leave the implementation to the developers. This will keep the development staff with technical knowledge of the systems they are maintaining, instead of getting rusty dealing with the corporate side of things.