Verizon

A great place to work if you have family life to attend to or want to get paid for doing nothing. People can often leave their laptops open for a week at a time or more, hop on meetings and say nothing, then live their lives. Get paid more to do less.

Often internal politics get in the way of doing business in systems engineering across wireline and wireless, to include fiber operations.

You basically read and follow instructions a high schooler could follow in maintenance windows. If it fails, you contact the vendor to fix it and babysit operations.

Internal infrastructure and teams you engage in are normally attempts to gain customers internally to establish fiefdoms of responsibility to avoid being laid off in what is called a "Riff" - reduction in faculty/force.

Many younger and hard-working talent get abducted to other companies or voluntarily leave because the workplace is toxic. Three times I watched young engineers leave after a year or more on projects.

The narratives to "automate" are a hollow gesture, and often times staff falsify their achievements on projects to engrandize themselves for promotions and climb the ladder, creating an atmosphere.

This job is verbatim why they made the movie Office Space, if TPS reports took 5 minutes and they staffed an entire workforce to work on nothing but TPS reports.

Verizon would also weirdly virtue signal different races each month despite having rampant issues with sexual harassment, misogyny (and they, multiple, got promoted) and racism.

Pair this off with the pros and take it at face value. If you can look past it because of Verizon's scale and the benefits, and you don't mind, it's a good workplace. It's a matter of scale and culture.

Fire all the managers, remove vendors, and internalize engineering. There is so much garbage overhead that it gets in the way of doing actual business.

Asking for advice to give management at Verizon is like asking the guy who's holding the knife who the murderer is.