I came to work at Teradata after my small marketing agency was acquired by them. While my direct managers were amazing (we'd worked together pre-acquisition), I never felt that the organization-at-large positioned my division as a whole for success.
My experience with Teradata is pretty well summed up by the time I spent a year with my immediate supervisor trying to get the Cloud Services division to set an FTP up for our clients and a dedicated server for us to run data analysis and development tests. When we finally accepted that we wouldn't get the FTP and got sick of begging for the tools to do what we needed to do, we asked for a desktop machine that I could keep at my desk to use for things that my laptop wasn't beefy enough to handle:
• IT: "What precautions will you be taking to ensure the data you'll be putting on this machine remains secure?"
• Me: "I won't be enabling wifi on it. It's going to be hard-wired to my laptop at my desk and only accessible via SSH login using the public RSA key on my Teradata laptop... Also, the drives will be encrypted, so even if someone were to physically remove them from the machine, they wouldn't be able to get anything from them."
• IT: "OK, but what would you do to secure it?"
• Me: "Isn't that what I just told you?"
• IT: "What if someone tries to hack into it?"
• Me: "Are you serious?"
• IT: "What if someone tries to hack into it? We take security very seriously, you know."
• Me: "Umm... if someone tried to break into the computer that's sitting on my desk, only accessible by my laptop, and then only while the two are physically connected? I don't know... I guess I'd ask them how they got past door security and tell them to get out of my seat."
It's a lot like that. (And, we never did get that machine.)
Also, the pay sucks (58% of the Bay Area average for my position), you get one week (that's five days) of paid vacation in your first year, their stock is tanking (down about 50% from a year ago), and they'll drug test you.
