Tech people - stay away, this is a meat grinder. - Avis employé Lead Systems Engineer Progressive Insurance

This place is filled with complacency and burnout. Even HR comes across like they don't care. Everyone on my team (including sister teams I worked with), including all the managers I had were completely stressed to the bone and running on fumes, and very open about hating their jobs. Headcount for most teams is way below what it should be, so everyone is doing triple the workload you'd find anywhere else. I worked at 6 different companies (mostly tech companies) before this and I was completely shocked at how much work everyone had, it's not sustainable. I will never work in a non-tech company again. A co-worker of mine experienced extreme depression and anxiety because of the job, and they found it extremely difficult to get any help within the company from management and HR. These two entities instead tried to protect the company instead of having empathy for my co-worker, they did nothing to try and help and reduce the stress and instead blamed this person for having the problems. After seeing this I wrote my ticket to get out of here. Managers here don't understand the service or skillsets they are managing. They are purely resource managers, they make sure your queue is filled with work and that it's getting completed. They don't know any of the technical details of the work you do. This can lead to them not understanding concerns you have about a certain project as you try to prevent it from derailing or going completely wrong - so you rarely get management support. It's all about "just get the work done" regardless of how pointless or wrong the execution outlined is. When you are drowning in work, they can't do anything about it. It's on you to do something about it. Very backwards. You'll find traditional IT flourishing here. Sharepoint and Lotus notes keep the internal business running, you'll be working on legacy tech, and in result your skillset and resume will suffer over time. You'll eventually be stuck here. Some have gotten to this point and accepted it, but at least they are making bank. Any new tech you try to bring in to solve problems is immediately scrutinized and blocked. You need to go through weeks of meetings in order to get approved to download and install anything. You also need to go through a change management process just to toggle some parameters on a server, this means a change management team that doesn't know anything about the tech you're doing has to decide whether or not to allow it to happen, and it can take a week to get approved. That "Lean" initiative is working well! Despite the newly established Cloud org, there still is an undertone of anti-Cloud, anti-container mindset in ETS because it threatens the old-timers' skillsets. They have no ambition to learn anything new and want to coast until retirement. It's in their best interest to road-block anything new and shiny that may make them irrelevant. The hype cycle is real, but some of this new tech is to make our jobs easier and allow us to deliver things faster. Embrace it. There's no working on one or two projects at a time. Instead you work on 10-15 projects at a time, and move each of them at a snails pace in a round-robin fashion every day. This also means you'll be in meetings from 9am-5pm every day, and you'll then need to do your actual work that you promised in the meetings after-hours at home. After all this, you'll still get the same raise % as the person on your team who did nothing all year because they try to be "fair". Most people here are nice, but there's a lot of people who aren't. Office politics are part of the game at the Lead / Consultant levels. You'll find this anywhere, but the toxicity of people here is pretty unique, because it's mixed with ignorance, partly because they haven't worked anywhere else since they graduated college in the 90s. A lot of people here reminisce about the old days at Progressive, pre-2008 where managers screamed at people like they were garbage and things were really combative. Most of the people working here learned from those people, I think that's partly to blame here. This place has more acronyms than the military. I think the C level actually cares and are trying to make changes. But this is a slow moving ship. Middle management is where all the problems are. Managers like to rotate to new teams every 3-5 years. The pattern here to get high up on the ladder is to rotate around to different parts of the company because experience in all areas of the company is highly valued. That's fine and all, but for you, this means when you eventually get a new manager, you have to take tons of extra time to help them understand what you actually do, what your team provides, and teach them the technology you're responsible for. It ends up being groundhog day for people who have been here a long time. It really slows things down. It would be much better to promote the high performers on the team to managers so things run more smoothly like most companies. Don't be fooled by the Innovation Garage when you tour the building, it's just for show; a startup culture facade. There are some people who actually want to be innovative and work on new tech there, but it'll eventually be roadblocked if you want to put it into the actual environment. Most of the garage folk are just tying teams together to execute a project / idea / hunch that some director wants to try out. The services they provide are at the expense of other teams that actually do the work, they are just middlemen. Lastly, a lot of projects here don't end up going anywhere. You burn midnight oil on things that never see full production, but even if it's a pointless project that won't go anywhere, it'll still be treated like its the highest priority imagined and needs to be done yesterday.