Pros
For the company itself, it's a fun place because every employee at head office has a free movie pass, that's a real benefit if you are really into movies. From time to time, you get movies related marketing materials for free, like T-shirts, DVD, posters.. etc. It's fun. In general, the benefit package and bonus system is decent, room for improvement on base salary though.
Cons
Nothing is wrong with the company itself, it is just the I.T. department is so corrupted. If you have a chance to go for an Interview, ask H.R. to provide you the extract numbers of the turnover rate or percentage of head office I.T. department (both operation and solutions group) in the last 5 years, I think you will be shocked. Why people left? There must be a reason, because they were NOT happy or some were "let go" for no reasons. The management of I.T. has been lead by a single person who is a dictator. The LACK OF PROCESS is the problem in this I.T. organization, since this person can override ANYTHING at ANYTIME even after signing off on paper (so, what's the point? what change request?). All you need to do is to PLEASE him, making sure he is happy and that's the key to climb up the ladder. For small potatoes like us, we were just trying to survive and we lived in fear all year long, thinking who will be next. Do you want to live in a country ruled by dictatorship? No, that's why you are in Canada. Why would you want a job like that? Good luck to you if you want to work in such department. Another person at the management level seems to be uneducated (even external consultants said the same, wondering if he had proper post secondary education), he is so low in EQ and easily get frustrated or get pissed. He sweared in front of us, even in formal meeting and that's just so unprofessional. This person definitely needs EQ rehabilitation. I just can't imagine this is happening in a business environment within such a decent size organization. I think he must be watching too much Gordon Ramsay on TV, well, such environment at least is not for me, I don't need that extra stress. I am surprised no employees have ever filed verbal harassment to H.R. If you think swearing is cool, go ahead and apply for the job. Although I wasn't there long enough, but from what I was told, they have switched development methodology many times due to change in mid management, what a joke. Indeed, I could tell from the code and database design, developers have been applying "patches" to fix leaks whenver it rains. The results - accumulated mess that nobody wants to maintain, so people started to quit. Simple as that. Trust is another issue, the management at the top in I.T. only trusts their own people (who brought with them from their previous work places) and they treated the new hires like idiots. People were not happy because there was no respect at all - management would say in front of everyone that their people is the best in the world, so does that imply the rest of us are useless? How will you feel? That hurts our feelings, no wonder why this ties back to proper education, because some of these people don't even know how to manage, don't even know when to use the right word. What defines a good manager? On the other hand, they hired external consultants to help implementing some projects which was a huge mistake, as consultants are so focus on delivery date to please the top, thus ignoring proper design and basic engineering. Consultants usually have options to take short cut and get the project delivered WITHOUT telling you, but who is going to maintain the big aftermath mess? Good luck to you. Salary wise is actually falling behind the competitors, that's another reason why so many people left the firm. You can easily get 15K-20K more somewhere else doing the same thing, that's what I did.
