IT, stay away, everyone else go ahead and apply. - Systems Analyst State Farm Employee Review

“The Systems department has so many issues, it's difficult to know where to begin. So, let's begin with the backstabbing, if you give an honest review of someone which is in anyway negative, you can expect in 6 months to get a review four times as bad from that person. Then there are the workers which steal your idea/solution to a problem and take all the credit. They move up in the world. They have a large amount of legacy code (PLI and COBOL), which they are slowly getting rid of but if a new person comes into the company with current skills, they could end up getting trained and working in a legacy language, which was not what they were hired for. However once you've moved, they got you because there really isn't many other places for an IT worker in town. I have certifications and years of Java experience but people who get a three week Java class get to create frameworks and decide on department direction because of who they know. Which brings me to the fact that State Farm systems thought they could do a better job creating a framework then Struts or JSF. Let's see, six people vs the rest of the world, how do you think they did? They ended up with a framework that required recreating every HTML field, only works with IE and doesn't work with AJAX. If you need a sortable table, you have to wait for the framework folks to create it, that is if you can convince them it's necessary. Oh yea, AJAX is another good one. One would think that if your framework doesn't support it, you'd change your framework. Not here, they are creating their own version of AJAX, one which really isn't asynchronous. They want to send back just part of the information on a screen but they want the hole screen to freeze/not respond to input until that little bit of info returns. Yes, SF has Java but more and more people are being forced into State Farm's proprietary framework or Accenture's, thus becoming unemployable else where. If your one who likes to keep your skills up todate so you can avoid being locked in and at the mercy of a company, then stay away from State Farm. Run before it's too late. In order to get promoted to a Systems Architect, you have to get approval from the existing architects. If your ideas disagree with their ideas you will never get in, no matter how good your ideas are or your work experience. Again, people who go to one class but know politics can become an architect over those with experience. There are some good managers but there are more "yes men" trying to get ahead and psycho's then good.”