IT Corporate Cultures Cons:
1) Not spending money is number one priority (Teradata earned $2.7 billion in 2013). Management will push back at all costs not to spend a single penny even if benefits outweigh costs 1000:1. Management only looks at the immediate upfront costs and doesn’t consider the long term. Teradata
2) Number two priority is keeping the lights on. Don’t touch anything unless you have to even if there are constant problems. Have been told numerous times by management not to fix problems so users won’t start using the system more.
3) Number three priority is meeting the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Primary goal is to click "Work Started" button in the Incident Management Application within 30 minutes. Actual problem resolution is irrelevant as long as the SLA is met.
4) EXTREMELY low salaries compared to the local average. Management constantly complains there are not enough developers looking for jobs even though they are everywhere. Management’s style for hiring is posting a position on the corporate website and waiting forever.
5) Communication within and between teams is almost no existent. Almost all management thinks they are God and communication to their peasants is unnecessary and a waste of time. This is extremely aggravating during non-communicated deployments and releases.
6) Almost all of the management and senior level development positions are filled by people who worked for Teradata/NCR/Att for 30 years. These individuals are set in their ways and have completely adapted to the environment they grew up in. This creates an extreme resistance to change to an extremely outdated organization.
7) Absolutely no training. No books, no classes, no documentation, knowledge sharing and transfer are considered overhead. Be ready to learn everything from scratch.
8) Testing and Quality Assurance is nonexistent and considered overhead. Pre prod testing is generally done by developers and 1st and 2nd level managers (oh yes managers frequently contribute to code line). Development is often done in prod and causes constant problems which are ignored.
9) Industry standards, fresh ideas, and critical thinking are strongly discouraged.
10) Management doesn’t trust development team and development team doesn’t trust management.
11) Developers carry pagers and are all levels of support. I, the developer, have had countless web conferences with end users telling them to "clear their browser cache".
12) End users suffer while management and the business ignore major application problems and frequent user complaints.
13) The only way to get a promotion is if someone else leaves and a higher paid position opens. This in itself is one of the reasons for the Extremely High Turnover within IT.
14) People outside of the IT organization hate us. They see the inadequacies of our organization and are told it is a good thing, costs are low.
15) Management will not buy tools necessary to complete job.
16) Some teams have nothing to do. I literally watch people play solitaire and watch full length movies in the office. Others are completely slammed and cannot breathe. Management is incapable of recognizing and rectifying this.
17) Applications have no road maps and IT as a whole has no long term plans. This leads to extreme inconsistency and far outdated technology and practices.
18) By far the worst management trait is the constant lying. Employees are constantly lied to and management constantly tries to hide and lie about problems. Management is not transparent and is locked into the mid 70’s management style.
19) Employees are told we are just lucky to have jobs and we should be extremely grateful.
Technical Cons:
1) Security is nonexistent. LAN credentials are sent in plain text (unencrypted) everywhere. Key individuals have access to all employee passwords. CUSTOMER credentials to CUSTOMER systems (IP addresses and credentials) are sent in plain text (unencrypted). Did I mention Teradata customers are “40% of the top ten global commercial and savings banks [2007]”. Security team has no power and does not ensure polices are enforced. Management sees no problems with this especially if you are behind the puny firewall. Teradata has 10,000+ employees which is very scary.
2) IT outages are frequent, long, and completely avoidable. This is true for all aspects of IT (Network, Data Storage Solutions, Servers, Application, and Databases etc). I have been at Teradata for 3 years and have lived through at least 2 instances where the entire data center unexpectedly crashed or went offline for hours.
3) Disaster Recovery is always a second thought and most applications have no or very little “actual” DR capability.
4) Critical applications frequently share same servers with other critical and non-critical applications even though Teradata has a poor VM environment. This creates constant confusion and unexpected application side effects.
5) Almost all applications home grown applications in IT have the early 2000’s look and feel.
6) New technology is strongly discouraged. New technology is categorized as anything developed in the last 10 years.
7) You will not stay up to date with industry trends and you technical skills will diminish over time.
