Pros
Some of your perks: - 7.5 hour work days - Flexible schedule (7-3:30, 8-4:30, etc.) - Fully funded pension (automatically vested after 5 years) - They pay for just about all of your health insurance (might have to pay in for family coverage though). Anything left in your "Benefit Dollars" allowance, you can get 50% back in a paycheck or 100% towards student debt. I really liked putting my excess dollars in my FSA, as you can pay for a lot of things, as you can use it towards your entire "household" so I could use it for my wife's menstrual products. Life hack! - WFH (although not sure this really applies to new hires, see Cons) - Company supplied hardware (laptop, dock, monitors, phones, keyboard/mouse) - Educational payback program (helps pay for student debt, if you have some left, and if you have "Benefit Dollars" left). - Profit sharing/Holiday bonuses - Matching 401k (up to 4%) - Insurance discount through Home Office Agency - Parental Leave - Continuous education reimbursements (for approved certifications/conferences) - Gym reimbursement program (like 50% up to $600, so you'd get like $300 back max, a year. I think. This is a relatively new one.) - No layoffs in entire company history! Generally speaking, the work culture at A-O is pretty good. Everybody seems to be treated fairly and with respect, which is really good. They also recently put together a diversity and inclusion committee which is cool, but I think was a bit unnecessary since I thought we were already doing a pretty good job with treating each other very well, no matter of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. But I think they created this due to recent events in our country. We got MLK day off as a company holiday out of this as well. The biggest one though, is that you'll find yourself working with some of the finest people I have ever met. A-O associates are a friendly group of people who are willing to help out whenever they can. I loved every single member of my team. You'll probably will too. In most cases, work will be breeze, so being surrounded by great people make it great place to work.
Cons
Yes, it is true, A-O does not have competitive pay in comparison to the current market. I've seen some new hire devs here leave and make double at comparable companies. A-O is bleeding very good talent right now. If you want to make 6 figs or even close, look elsewhere. I think this is due to being able to not have to lay anyone off in over 100 years. So you'll have to weigh job security vs competitive pay. This increase of high turnover makes it harder for those who do decide to stay to here (overhead of training/mentoring someone who'll leave in a year). So it hurts everyone. Management is not consistent, jumping team to team. I've had managers that were very lenient and understanding, but others being stricter than strict. Not to mention your common personality differences that can either make working at A-O enjoyable or miserable. The work from home program was honestly a joke. Not sure if they have changed things since I left. But with new hires, you have to be in the office 4 days a week, and the fifth day you could work from home. I guess it also depends on you manager as they have the final word on how much you can work from home. Not very enticing, if you ask me. The company was able to thrive during the pandemic with everyone working from home, including all of new hires! Plus, depending on the project you're working on, you may be asked to work a day or so in the office, while the rest of your team can 100% WFH. I don't think that is very fair. Oh, and if you go in the office to work, it's Business Casual dress code. So like a polo shirt and long dress slacks are a minimum for guys. So no hoodies or shorts that you'd normally be able to wear while working from home. Although I heard that now some webex meetings might require you to the same dress code. But that might've been more for client-based meetings, not meetings with other associates. Also depending on the team/project, you could easily burnout. So definitely watch out for that. They claim to have a healthy work/life balance, here at A-O, but I have found that is not always the case (especially nowadays). I used to brag about this balance, as a defense to never leave A-O (even fully aware that better pay is out there), but once you start to bear the burden of some projects, as it piles on, you start to question if the pay is worth it. For me, it wasn't. Pay transparency is not a thing here. I knew I was up for a promotion, but could not even get a range of what it would look like in terms of money. I guess this is in A-O's favor, because your yearly merit raise will typically never be more than 5%, even with a promotion. If I knew that, I wouldn't be as motivated as I would be with not knowing. However, there are different pay grades which I would hope would have more significant raises, but you'd have to be there for many, many, years to actually see that. Really anti-motivational, really. Never get to see the potential you'll have if you stick with A-O. My new job immediately told me what I could make at the next promotion, and first of all, it was a lot more than 5%, and second of all, they were even able to tell me before my first day. Oh, and if you become a COBOL developer, you will be paid less than an Java or other "modern" devs. I think they really need to make bigger pushes away from mainframe or make this pay gap not exist. Because who's teaching COBOL in schools? None that I know of. In fact, I never heard of it until I came to A-O. Makes it a more scarce pool to pick up good, experienced COBOL devs. Idk, just IMO. Speaking of COBOL, the technology you'll use here can be pretty deprecated/archaic (depending on your team). I think you'll find this anywhere, but I feel like I lose out on learning new practical technologies/techniques, because you have to spend more work hours on outdated or unsupported technologies, even as a Java dev. I will say, there are a few teams at A-O that do some really cool stuff and have pretty modern stuff. Others, not so much.
