AT&T Reviews in New York City, NY Area

Pros

if you are contented, and not ambitious, AT&T is the place to be. But, if you want more, then you may not get the opportunitiy and you should leave.

Cons

Depends on what you want out of AT&T - it was great for me for a couple of years, and then I had to move on since I wanted to do get out of telecom and work in other industries.

Advice to Senior Management

I think they are doing a very good job....keep it up.

Pros

Flexibility in operations, and team spirit is good. Politiics are not present at the working level.

Cons

Bureacracy in completing projects
process and prophesies
very risk averse and cautious

Advice to Senior Management

Communicating better with employees and being transparent
Have better career path and promotions for top performers

Pros

AT&T sends paychecks out on time. They tend to pay what seem to be reasonable severance for employees who are laid off. Entry level management salaries appear to be fair.

On an individual basis, I have worked with some truly stellar people, including all of my immediate supervisors. I have worked with individuals who truly cared about the brand and our customer experience. I have learned a lot from them. The most intelligent and productive people I have ever met in my life, I met at AT&T. When AT&T is (was) at its best, it is *the best* in the industry.

Cons

Since the merger, there is no consultation between middle and upper management and front line employees and/or managers. It was not always this way. And when I mean no consultation, I mean no consultation whatsoever. Something like 6 people (I have lost count) have "run" my "organization" in the past 2 years; I had no opportunity to even meet any of them. One was despised by everyone to the point where people would openly talk about how frustrating he was to work for, but no one would ever confront him, even in a constructive manner, to let him know that a lot of the whims he demanded people act on made no business sense whatsoever.

When management gets a whim, everyone is afraid to say anything or raise red flags because the attitude seems is, "Just be lucky you still have a job." The company operates using, basically, negative reinforcement - management governs by the stick.

Organizationally, it seems to play musical chairs constantly, organizing individual teams into wildly inappropriate organizations which have nothing to do with what the team actually does. I am waiting for the finance staff to placed under the custodial department.

The past 4 years, especially, have been a series of layoffs and disgruntled people leaving the company. Things tend to have a "slowly sinking ship" feel. People are laid off all around you, suddenly and seemingly without discretion, often leaving teams ludicrously understaffed. Even if I make allowances for not seeing the "big picture" in the way upper management do, I have to seriously wonder sometimes if layoffs are done completely at random, and without any assessment of possible consequences.

No time is taken to document procedures, processes, and systems, so it becomes necessary to reinvent the wheel constantly. Sometimes, entire systems are abandoned, left running, with no one ultimately responsible for them, ghost machines chugging away in the night. There is simply no time to document anything or transition things in an orderly fashion. Middle and upper management either do not care, or do not how to address the aggressive, reckless, impetuous cost cutting which has become a managerial fetish in the past several years.

There is no money for infrastructure or IT; many internal systems are laughably ancient and/or obsolete. There appears to be little or no leadership in the industry. AT&T, basically, reacts to what other companies do. The general feeling is that consumers are in awe of our brand name alone, so the way the company runs, or the quality of its products is secondary to the swooning admiration consumers (they think) have for the stripey blue globe.

My workload has more than quadrupled and I have no personal life anymore. I work from the time I wake up until I go to sleep, and often on weekends. I am useless to my family in the free time I do have because I am so exhausted.

I'm afraid to turn down any responsibilities already placed on my overloaded plate for fear of being let go. There just aren't any other jobs around; I've looked. Despite this unhappy situation, I have given every last bit of energy I have to the company. I am fairly certain it will not be reciprocated or even noticed.

Yet, with benefit cuts (another major downside), I am making pretty much the same thing I made 4 years ago, despite positive appraisals. I've concluded there is nothing I can do to get ahead. Lest one conclude that this is exclusively my fault, I would point out that of the 200 or so people who were batch-hired when I signed up with the company, to my knowledge I am the only one left; they have retained me either for reasons I do not understand or because I have not said "no" to any request or responsibility, however unreasonable. I have done my part. I am easy to work with, and a team player. I have painstakingly honed my professional demeanor to be as positive, outgoing, and helpful as possible, but this has failed to make any kind of impact.

The mergers have left so many redundancies that there is little upward promotion. I have basically given up any hope of being promoted. I have attempted to maintain a positive attitude and even sought constructive advice on how to get ahead, because I am more than qualified now to run a team in my particular skill area.

No one has anything to say other than there's nothing I can do, things just are the way they are. I have scoured appraisal comments for some indication that my stagnation is a result of a personal deficiency and have critically looked at my own performance, and I find no explanation for why I am still doing the same job now that I was doing 10 years ago. I accept responsibility for the fact that I should have seen this coming and left the company some time ago. But I *wanted to be an AT&T employee*. I was proud. I wanted to use my talents to help make this company successful. Naively, I believed I would be taken up on the offer, and possibly compensated for it. It is my fault for not understanding the unfortunate direction the company was headed in.

AT&T now pays contractors to do work that it should be an industry leader in and selling as a service to other companies. It has become fickle and short-term oriented. It does little research or innovation of its own - the iPhone is a perfect example.

Internal objectives and accomplishments tracking is particularly amusing, given the complete understaffing and number of proverbial holes in the dam that need to be plugged. So you start the year with, say, 10 objectives, all of which need to be tied to some kind of mathematical metric (however inappropriate for the task at hand that is - I have to basically make stuff up for some of my responsibilities because they don't track to a mathematical metric). Then half your organization is laid off, and you've inherited those responsibilities.

Meanwhile half of your objectives are no longer relevant by years end, but guess what your appraisal will be based on? Nothing you do outside of those objectives will count for anything. As a result, people just let things fall through the cracks. Things fall apart - often collapsing suddenly - and no one will accept blame, and fair enough, because those things weren't in anyone's objectives. There is no incentive whatsoever to do anything other than what is on your list, which is not an appropriate situation given the massive attrition and layoffs AT&T has become so fond of.

Paperwork has increased dramatically since the merger. More and more time is taken up with whims and pointless formalities, including but not limited to the astoundingly poor, and often completely irrelevant online training they require. I work in IT; I have nonetheless been required to take online courses in things like underground fuel storage and federal regulations pertaining thereto. That was maybe 18 months ago. To this day, I have no idea why.

Overall, the general feeling within the company is decay. When the mergers occurred, I thought we'd be blasting off like a rocket, with SBC's expertise providing some substance and energy to AT&T's declining fortunes. Instead, the slide has continued. Morale is horrible and continuing to sink. The declining economy has made people concerned (understandably) almost exclusively with earning a paycheck, so unhappy folks will stay on, which will result in a further decline of morale. While everyone I know who has been laid off was dismayed to lose the paycheck and confront the chaos of unemployment, not one was sad to be leaving AT&T's negative and dispiriting corporate culture.

I used to really love working for this company, but now I loathe every day, and I begin loathing Monday morning by the time I wake up on Saturdays. It's sad, because this once-great company, the company of Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone system, and innovation and scientific research (Bell Labs) is now all about the service equivalent of cheap plastic widgets.

My hope is that the company changes course, finds its groove again, finds a way to make employees proud to work for it again, and become a leader in the industry. This could happen but it will take a visionary at the helm. One should not read my negativity as contempt; it is sadness and disappointment. I want to feel the same kind of enthusiasm and pride I felt when I first signed on with this embattled corporation.

I have put so much sweat into this company, and it is truly discouraging to see it all for, apparently, naught.

Advice to Senior Management

I would have no idea what to tell them other than dragging employee morale down through the mud has a price - one which will have consequences once this economic slump is through and previously loyal employees leave en masse for less depressing, better compensated environments.

Pros

Better than no job. Reasonably safe (for now) from layoffs and downsizing.

Cons

Incredible bureaucracy! Most of my time is spent on overhead that would be unnecessary at a normal company. To be fair, this is partly an unavoidable consequence of size, but AT&T sets a new standard. Thank god we are a monopoly! We'd never survive in a truly competitive environment. It make for a lot of drudgery.

Low technology. Innovation, at least internally, is stifled. Corporate email accounts are limited to 35 MB! (You are supposed to download to your laptop/desktop and work out your own backup strategy). Laptops provided (even to tech workers) are 2+ year old technology. All internal IT systems are being herded to a one-size-fits-all architecture. Variations are punished with crushing amounts of paperwork, approvals, and other overhead that makes it almost impossible. Workers are slotted to do one thing---probably to set up their jobs for off-shoring. Hard to find anything on the internal web. The simplest things (e.g. checking vacation balance, signing up for mandatory training) can take an hour due to poorly designed internal systems. Telecommuting is strongly discouraged---even if most of your job is solo work and conference calls.

I could go on. Why would any young, talented worker choose AT&T over, say, Google? Beats me. Most of the people I work with are older workers with 20+ years in and are hanging on until retirement.

Advice to Senior Management

Retire.

Pros

Exposure to diverse technologies and new equipment. Knowing that there is money to purchase equipment required.

Cons

The company has epoused the classic AT&T culture, which means things have reverted back to the 1980s or 1970s. Work that would have taken hours takes days. Work that would have taken days takes weeks or months. Things are so process oriented and there are so many layers to prevent work from happening. The company has gone from a streamlined group of go-getters (from SBC days) to an empire of bloat that is focused on job security.

Advice to Senior Management

Dump the legacy AT&T Lab folks. Go back to the days of real innovation and empowering those who want to better the network.

Pros

What do I like About the Company? Very little.

Cons

Employees are treated like crap. The typical attitude: "If you're not happy with AT&T policy, no one cares, find another job". The pay is not competitive. The benefits are not competitive (the health care is the worst). Promotions literally don't exist in many organizations (no exaggeration). If you're stuck with a lousy manager, upper management could care less. And, best of all, while the rest of the country is going "green", AT&T is going "black" (no exaggeration). No working from home because AT&T doesn't trust its employees. Way To Go AT&T!

Advice to Senior Management

Advice to Give to Senior Management .. Why? They don't listen and they don't care.

Pros

1. learning opportunities
2. financial rewards
3. develop the skills to perform under high pressure

Cons

1. lack of supports from management - they don't want to listen to any problems or concerns whether it's business or personal.
2. atmosphere not friendly - all business...results,results, results. It gets very mean and hostile at times.
3. some managers managed with iron fists...management training should help to improve this.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat your employees with respect - action not words. Be more sincere.
Help employees balance work & family life.
Show some compassion to employees when in needs.

Pros

Company is willing to invest capital in projects that are forward looking. Company also invests in training and education for its colleagues. With that said, it is up to the individual to find those training opportunities. If one is willing to spend some time navigating the education materials (via intranet, corporate subscriptions, internal training, etc.) there is a signifigant amount of learning that be had.

Cons

Upward mobility is limited due to the fact that senior management is now located in Texas.

Advice to Senior Management

Technology drives this company and its employees. Failure to find new and exciting ways to provide those services to customers could result in reverting back to the stodgy Ma Bell persona.

Pros

Technical challenges are there should you need them.

Cons

SBC takeover still controls closed mind minded attitude toward labs work. AT&T Labs is NO Google as far as fostering innovation and freedom of thought.

Advice to Senior Management

Watch out, the world will be passing you by.

Pros

Salary is good if you started a long time ago and worked your way up. 401K is good - match of 80% on the basic 6% contribution (that's better than the 67% from the old AT&T). If you are lucky to find yourself in the AT&T Labs unit, there is still interesting work that does not get outsourced to IBM (like legacy projects) and then end up in India.

Cons

These Texans (new SBC management) are some serious bunch of bean counters. It seems as if the only thing that matters to them is process and measuring it. Processes change every 1.5 years. Those are the guys that have job security. They have sucked any kind of creativity and enjoyment completely out of software development. They call us software developers "factory" - it's even in their ridiculous online training. Project Managers are valued - but worked like dogs. Benefits packages are declining every year, but I guess that's the way things are going with all large corporations in this global economy.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop with all of the process "improvement". ExpressOne, now ITUP. What's coming next year? I spend more time training for your processes than I do for my job function.