Verizon

The company offers a 401K plan with company match, internal training resources, a wireless plan discount, tuition assistance or a loan program, and salary.

Notice how all the items listed in the Pros section have nothing to do with human connection. This is what the behemoth Verizon is sorely lacking, and it has become worse over time, not better.

Verizon values tools and processes over people and interactions. It's reflected in how the company increasingly relegates functions once made rich and alive by human interaction to stale and impersonal automation.

Because of its size and misplaced value on profit over people, Verizon cultivates a management style which, among other things, prizes meeting a set of yearly executive criteria. This is trickled down through the hierarchy to employees.

The employees are left mostly without support as they struggle to achieve these criteria during the course of a year, while also working feverishly on daily work and meeting compressed project deadlines with too little manpower and too many chiefs.

It's quite similar to the blight infecting schools these days: "teaching to the test". Developing curiosity and teaching children how to learn has been cast aside in favor of meeting state or federal statistics for one thing or another.

Children have been reduced to a number, their potential forgotten and left to rot. The same is true with Verizon. The workforce is a statistic that's counted and moved here and there, or slashed in yearly cullings.

One such example (and there are many) of this abdication from valuing the individual is its "performance review" process.

See, once upon a time the role of a manager was naturally thought of as a person who continuously engaged with her employees as they moved forward together through the year working towards common goals, innovating, and bettering each other through idea exchange, delivering quality solutions.

The manager was the tide that lifted all ships, removing obstacles impeding the progress of the team, and ensuring the team was equipped with knowledge and tools to achieve their goals. She was an essential and symbiotic component of her employees' success.

Upon review time, such a manager would have amassed quite a wealth of knowledge about his employees' endeavors over the previous year. This would enable him to provide insightful feedback, suggestions for improvement, job counseling, and wise mentoring born of direct experience.

You will have no such manager and no such opportunity for this type of review in Verizon. (And because of that, your opportunity for growth depends on you and you alone.)

The role of a manager in Verizon is to collect metrics to pass along to their own manager.

Managers don't manage people anymore; they manage status reports, numbers, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets.

Because they've had no time for you during the year (and many have grown to have no interest as well), Verizon has roboticized your review process in a horribly misplaced effort to fill the gap.

You will access an online form into which your yearly accomplishments are entered under their appropriate corporate objective. These objectives had to be entered at the beginning of the year, also by you.

(If you're lucky, your manager will have shared her high-level objectives with you, giving you at least somewhere to begin.)

Once finished, a button is pressed, an email is sent, your manager acknowledges. The process culminates in an eventual meeting where your accomplishments are skimmed through.

The manager gives you some form of the "keep doing more with less" pat on the head speech, and maybe provides an improvement suggestion or area of focus for the next year.

Heads nod, phones are hung up, the online tool is accessed again, buttons pressed, and in a month or so the whole process starts again.

Robotic, impersonal, disaffected, terribly misguided. This is just one example among many of how a company goes in the wrong direction when it has lost sight of what its real value is composed of and what is really fueling the engine of its success – its living, breathing, people.

Verizon has a habit of cutting personnel and throwing software in the gap, expecting the latter to produce results like the former.

The people that are left shoulder the responsibilities of those departed. After all, the work doesn't go away!

We find in some cases entire systems being supported by one, two, or three individuals who now labor under the responsibilities of project manager, architect, developer, administrator, quality control, tester, trainer, technical writer, and more.

While there can be enormous freedom in such a wide space to play, it's ruined by the culture of isolation and disaffectedness and leaves no time for technology and skillset growth.

Of particular interest to those looking for technical work is understanding that Verizon is at least 10 years behind in its internal technology.

In 2015, laptops were still equipped with Windows 2008 and Office 2007.

Wireline engineers use intranet web applications built in 1999 with no hope of upgrade because of a codebase so ugly and disparate, and for which fixing bugs takes months, if they're fixed at all.

Not to mention that most development has been shipped overseas to teams with enormous language barriers, constant rotation, and "leaders" more concerned with securing their positions than innovating and moving forward.

On a final note, the massive IT organization also decided recently to "do Agile."

That phrase alone should send you running because those who truly embody and practice the Agile philosophy know that when a company professes it's "doing Agile," it's pretty much guaranteed that company knows nothing about BEING Agile.

Verizon does not have an Agile mindset. Agile begins with valuing people, after all, and it will take years for Verizon to change its warped internal culture of self-preservation, pettiness, and people-are-only-resources to the holistic and community-oriented together approach of the Agile philosophy.

It's certainly possible to be happy while employed with Verizon. The satisfaction brought by things like a steady salary, 401K, free training, a cubicle, and a cell phone plan discount can indeed last awhile.

Eventually though, my guess is that such satisfaction with inanimate things will ultimately fade for the idea people, the creative people, the growth people, the innovative people.

We thrive when we're valued, when we're working with each other and challenging each other, momentum fueled in an atmosphere of encouragement and by striving for success together.

If you're such a person, you should look elsewhere. A younger, more forward-thinking company will best help you develop your purpose and passion.

Learn what it means to value employees.

Stop looking up the chain and at your endless status reports. Instead, apply yourself where you will do the most good and actually fulfill the role of a manager.

That is by being involved with the people you are responsible for.

If that means bucking the system, then buck the system.

Dare to be more than ordinary, and your people will thank you.

Become a servant leader, and your people will never want to leave.

Transform your thinking from Verizon's current stodgy culture of greed and selfishness, and be something better.

Challenge yourself to transform and watch what happens.