Verizon

• Excellent benefits
• Great resources available to learn and improve your skills
• They have a technology solution to be able to get your work done
• Great office and cafeteria

• Depending on your manager, you could have no work-life balance.
• Constant roadblocks to implementing new solutions. Got an idea? Wait one year and maybe they’ll implement it.
• Teammates could work from all over the world, making it difficult to sync up with one another. There would be times I would be working at midnight (on non-release nights) just to get the chance to work with a coworker from the other side of the world.
• An antagonistic manager.

I had to take time off to get surgery. I let my team and manager know weeks in advance and sent a reminder the day before with progress reports on all of my projects. The day of the surgery, I was under anesthesia, and my manager called three times, with my teammate calling once. I was able to somehow reply once the operation was over. They were calling me about something new that came up, but it wasn’t a mission-critical item. Once the anesthesia wore off, I was able to get them the information and started to update my resume.

I’ve always worked hard, but this last manager would call me at odd hours over the weekend and holidays. Every time I’d complete something, I was met with negativity and got blamed for things I had no part in.

You might think that the issue was with me, but I’ve been at my new job for a year, and I’ve been highly successful with the same job title. The only difference is the coding language and the way my manager manages.

Managers should be employee-focused. Simply getting to know their employees as people can help in knowing how to get them to succeed.

I understand that managers are under the watchful eyes of those above them on the totem pole, so they need to make sure they deliver what they can. But this creates a hostile environment for the employees, which is why the churn rate is so high (at least when I left in January).