Aetna Reviews in Hartford, CT Area

Pros

Management and the human resources team stress career development and the company has a lot of growth opportunities for interested employees.

Cons

Aetna is a huge company. You can easily get lost in the complex structure.

Pros

Great working atmosphere. Tons of opportunity to grow through the learning center.

Cons

No matter how above and beyond you go it seems like you are always rated a three on your score card.

Pros

* very innovative and forward thinking leadership team
* strong identification with, and adherance to, company values
* integrity of leadership and general employee population
* collaborative environment - if you don't cooperate, you won't be successful
* inspiring vision (desire to be the very best in the industry worldwide)

Cons

* tough to maintain work-life balance; management encourages it, but does not effectively role model it
* health benefits not as competitive as they could be
* high pressure, metrics driven environment

Pros

Great benefits, above average pay, great people, open door managers policy. Ability to work from home when needed is a huge advantage

Cons

Even though promotions come from within, they don't happen early or often. Need to stand out in order to reach your potential.

Advice to Senior Management

It is important for managers to talk more to regular employees so they know what is actually going on in the department. It's important to not just look from a high level.

Pros

Good Pay. good work life balance

Cons

Bad Management
bad work life balance

Advice to Senior Management

Look at the baseline

Pros

-Good experience
-A capstone project for all interns
-Networking events with other interns and employees
-Looks good on your resume

Cons

-Programmers are offshore
-Didn't learn too much during the internship.
-Projects were trivial, not too related to the team.
-Team doesn't really care about you as the intern (they have more important tasks than helping you) except for your manager

Advice to Senior Management

It would be a better internship experience if you give relevant projects for the interns to do and help them along the way if they need help.

Pros

Great hours (you can set them), option to work from home for a lot of employees.
Not too grueling (from my side)
Company gym
Great cafeteria
Company campus is well served by public transit (a lot of bus links from neighboring suburbs = save money on commuting)

Cons

Can be a very sleepy place to work (which can be a major upside for some people)
I've heard that it can be hard to break from middle management to senior management.

Advice to Senior Management

Doing a great job so far, make sure that Aetna can handle the changes brought on by healthcare reform profitably!

Pros

Flexible hours in my dept
Good co-workers
Some opportunities to learn new skills, etc

Cons

Manager obviously had favorite people - he only talked to me & my co-workers if he needed something done or we didn't do something correctly or quickly enough.
Management style was to throw people into new situations (with no direction) to see how they would handle it - he thought everyone should be able to figure things out without any help.
Also many at the management level lack actual people skills.
Never showed any appreciation for job well done - only pointed out flaws and provided "constructive criticism".

Advice to Senior Management

Sometimes hiring right out of college is not the best thing to do. Also, some actual management training for those promoted from within the ranks would be useful. Recognize and reward your employees when things go right - don't just point out all the negative.

Pros

The interview is very easy because no technical questions were asked the entire time.
The work schedule is flexible. I was able to show up whenever I wanted and leave whenever I wanted as long as I attended the meetings and I got my work done.
Every one is allowed to work from home, wether you need a couple of hours, a couple of days, or full time at home (from any state in the US).
Aetna offers free classes to help with personal/retirement finances.

Cons

Almost all of the people who actually do all of the coding and testing are based out of India.
Almost all of the project management, developers, and QA people are either consultants or from the outsourcing companies. The team I last worked on started with 4 employee developers and 20 offshore developers. When I left it was 2 employee developers and 24 offshore developers. This makes collaboration and maintaining code standards near impossible.
IT at Aetna is a lot like working for a consulting company where the business department will ask you for a change to some application, you will cost it out, and then it is up to the people from the business department to decide if they want to move forward and pay for the change. This means that there are no improvements to the code / infrastructure unless it is directly coming from a business department (or the application breaks).
There are few perks to working in any of the offices. There are no free food / drinks, no free gym, no free recreation room, or useful services (to someone under 30)
You have to pay for parking in the Aetna owned parking lots.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop outsourcing all of the development / QA work. Just because you hate making jobs in the US do not take it out on the few full time employee developer that exist in the company. Since I have worked at Aetna (started in 2005) the overall quality of the applications and my understanding of how applications / systems work has gone down because Aetna as a whole is not looking for talent, but for lowest cost people. The quality of the developers I work with is so low that we spend 25% - 50% of the time and money changing what was already created because it was not done correctly.

Pros

The product I support is AMAZING to work in. In my role I get the chance to reach out and be exposed to MANY high ranking employees. Everyone is very competent and never say no. PTO is never denied, even when busy, overtime is great, work from home is granted to every member of the unit. Love it! Benefits are better than our competitors, UNH has higher cost medical, lower 401k match, higher deductibles. Heres a tip you get $600 off a year for, not using tobacco and passing metabolic syndrome. I pay $11 a check.....

Cons

Pay for gym- cheaper than my other gym- Anytime fitness
Acquisitions on the rise, would rather see in-house development
Conservative Approach to Underwriting- Take more risk- win more bids

Advice to Senior Management

Remember your staff and seek greater bonuses