Stay Far Away From This Company
Pros
-In my experience they will attempt to tell you absolutely everything you want to hear during the hiring process, but much of it was not true. so actually this is a Con that only appears to be a Pro. -Were willing to compete with other offers. -Were very agreeable, pleasant and willing to work with me during the interview/hiring process.
Cons
I didn't read the reviews until after I left Home Paramount. I'm creating this review so that those who are wiser than me can approach a business relationship with this company with their eyes wide open. High turnover - Before accepting an offer with this company ask how long the team that you will be working with has been in their positions. Ask how long your supervisor(s) has been in their position. It will likely be in the weeks to months range if that (if they don't simply prevaricate on the answer). I would tell you to ask why the previous employees left, but I believe that you are unlikely to receive a truthful or useful answer. I implore you to use your intuition, if something smells even the slightest bit fishy or seems off about this job, go with that feeling and keep looking or go with other offers because you are correct in that it is an extremely fishy place. I ignored small weird things and red flags during the hiring process because they put on a good show and they said most of the right things and now I deeply regret not going with a different offer. All that to say, do yourself a favor and request a complete history of the IT department's hires and departures in the last 18 - 24 months it will be eye opening and will give you a better understanding of what you are getting into. Very Disorganized - With such high turnover, maintaining institutional knowledge through documentation is crucial. In my experience even much of the most basic mission critical documentation does not exist in this organization. Before you accept an offer ask to get a look at their documentation, even the most basic things that you would not normally think to ask for like building network layout (i.e. where does this network outlet lead?). In my experience the documentation necessary to perform your job does not exist and no one will be able to answer 90% of your questions or provide documents that contain the answers because the documents don’t exist and your peers and supervisors are also new hires that were thrust into a similar situation with no documentation. It is likely that much of your time will be spent tracking down old disorganized file shares and sparse documents to glean what you can about the software and equipment that you are expected to administer. Bizarre Managerial Priorities - if none of that other stuff scares you or this kind of environment sounds like an adventure, sort of like scrapping your way to a modern well documented and efficient IT environment, then I understand because that is exactly how I felt. While I was disappointed that the reality did not match what I was sold on during the hiring process I thought "hey at least there is a lot to do, and a guy with my skills and experience will be extremely useful here!". Looking back I cannot believe I was foolish enough to actually have this deluded optimism. If you still want to pursue this position then do not make the mistake of actually talking to your users in an attempt to get a sense of what they do as this is a cardinal sin within this organization. Although no one will tell you, understanding and knowing your users and their jobs is not considered to be within your area of responsibility even though this information about your users is not documented anywhere. If you attempt to self orient by spending time learning about your users it is considered to be wasting time, and it will not be tolerated. Given that there are no other orientation tools or mechanisms in place I have no idea how one is expected to gain a clear understanding of the IT business processes within the company. Frankly I got the sense that they don’t even understand why such information is important for the job. Your IT peers and supervisors do not know this information (because they are new too) and they appear to be in survival mode when it comes to improving the basics because the leadership appears to arbitrarily believe that IT conditions can be improved without communication; that or they don’t care what it actually takes and have no desire to actually leverage the knowledge and experience of their team to come up with a plan. How ever you plan to gather crucial information regarding your job it had better be from within your cubicle otherwise you will be accused of engaging in superfluous activities. So if you are still interested then good luck friend you are a better IT person than I am. Forthrightness - I think the part that gutted me most in my brief time with this organization is that they failed at every point to be honest and forthright about the state of their IT department before I came on board. Many crucial and shocking revelations about the state of the department were not divulged until my first day, while others were things that only came to light when I specifically asked, The picture that was painted was that of a forward looking, organized, consistent IT department that was ready to step their game up to the next level. The reality is that basic organization, documentation, practices and staff are not up to par (staff through no fault of their own as they are new too), this place is a fixer upper project which is fine, even attractive and exciting, but upper management seems to be extremely interested in what they believe you should appear to be doing in the way they believe you should appear to be doing it as opposed to actually discussing what you are doing, how you are going about it and collaborating on ways to effectively accomplish a coherent IT vision. I do not believe that this company will suddenly change their stripes and start offering a clear and honest picture of the actual internal state of affairs and their actual expectations, nor do I believe they will change their very peculiar and uninformed views on how one should go about accomplishing the business of IT administration in their unseasoned, haphazard and undocumented IT environment. So if after reading this you absolutely must put yourself through this, then ask as many questions as you can even basic ones that you don't think you need to, VERIFY as best you can that what they are telling you is a true reflection of the facts, insist on receiving very clear and detailed parameters and expectations of your specific position, and most importantly do not be charmed, do not let them evade by stroking your ego or offering money and career advancement, do not take their word for anything Verify and/or GET IT ALL IN WRITING. Good Luck.
