I was placed into Verizon through Disys, a horrible contracting company. My contact at Verizon wanted to hire me as an FTE right away, but his management made him go through a very scummy contracting company. I was treated well by Verizon and terribly by Disys.

The interview process was bizarre: I was asked no technical questions at all.

They tried to convert me to an employee (at a rank above even MTS-4), but neither my boss, nor his, nor even his above him, the director, was allowed to hire anyone. I ended up in a lead position. Two years after I was brought on, senior management freaked out and fired all IT contractors and a huge number of regular employees, even from groups that were growing and profitable like mine.

We were in the middle of a release, and I was their lead and their defacto release manager. My director was told he could keep me, but they went behind his back and fired every single contractor, reneging on their word to him.

I could have walked at that point, but I had friends on the team, so I put in 120 hours in the remaining 8 days (including a holiday) trying to get the release into shape and making sure everything was covered. I was doing the job of three people there, and everyone was devastated. I got a nice going-away party, etc., etc., etc.

Upper management are fools for treating creative staff like interchangeable parts; the layoff culture there is poisonous. That even my director was not dealt with honestly by upper management gives me no confidence in them whatsoever. That said, everyone I worked with at Verizon on my immediate team, and management to the first three levels above me, were all great people. But everything above them is a madhouse.

They keep making fewer people do more and more work, and it doesn't hold together. The technical debt is staggering.

The oddest question was whether I understood that they were a big company. They did not ask actual programming questions. I wish they had; the overseas elements were very, very bad programmers, and we onshore people were constantly having to mop up after them.