Pros

This is a company in a very large, important and in-demand industry. We will always need healthcare and will only continue to need more of it as time goes on. With that, all these kinds of jobs are here to stay. The company seems to make money which is not a bad place to be in the current economy.

I am never worried about my job being outsourced somewhere else. My department was actually brought back in house as a cost-saving and quality improvement initiative. From what I can tell we always meets those targets and management is very satisfied with the work we perform.

I get something like 23 days/yr of PTO (good for sick time or vacation) and I've rarely had problems getting days off when I need them.

People in the office are generally upbeat and there aren't any real office politics problems. There is a sense of satisfaction in solving people's IT problems - I can't fix everyone's problems all the time but I do my best. We are an internal help desk, so 99% of my calls are from essentially my extended family of coworkers around the globe.

For this kind of a job, the pay isn't bad. It's better than other helpdesks out there.

Cons

My job is starting to feel really repetitive. There are many problems which get farmed out to workgroups and I don't get to really fix anything. I feel like a slave to the phone and to call handle times. The management don't give me tons of tools or authority to fix things, yet get all snippy about resolving these issues in the first call. Hey, if you don't give me the tools, training and ability to fix your obscure mainframe app, how do you expect me to fix it?

I feel unappreciated for my hard work. I often get calls from higher-up people (and even not high-up at all!) and take the time to get these people working, especially when they have a crisis, a deadline, when there are real problems going on! Yet all the management cares about are metrics like call handle times. They don't seem to care if we go above-and-beyond in quality, in trying to fix a chronic or recurring problem or if we try to diffuse some other problem that some other goofball caused. If that is all they want - low call handle times - sub the work out to India, you will get worthless results but hey, we will meet all your metrics! Are we taking catalog orders here or are we fixing computer problems?

I get calls from contractors overseas and they are often hard to work with due to language/cultural barriers, phone line quality, incongruities in how corporate stature is treated in other cultures and sometimes general arrogance. Now I shouldn't say that all my calls from overseas are bad, many are OK, but some are ridiculous. I get calls from people in the Phillipines who are too scared to do what I ask them to do because they perceive me as a supervisor or higher role and they don't want to screw it up. I get calls from people in India who think that I am a "stupid American" for some reason and want to tell me how to do my job and do it on a horrible sounding speakerphone from 12000 mi away.

I don't see an easy way up into something I want to do. Maybe that's just a sign of the times. But this by most measures is a stepping-stone type of position and I'm not seeing a great way out of it.

Their idea of a bonus is an insult. When I was given a bonus at my last review, I almost asked to be paid in dog biscuits instead. I don't see what most of the supervisors there actually do. I receive no training from them. My performance is graded by them I guess. I really don't have that much interaction with my supervisor, so I don't see how having one monthly meeting with them is going to make me work faster and harder at fixing IT problems. I feel like their only role is to babysit. I show up everyday and work hard, I don't need a babysitter.

There are no women at all in my department. It is the biggest bunch of stereotypical fat, geeky, poorly-dressed, Dungeons & Dragons, live-in-mom's-basement, drink-Mountain-Dew and eat Cheetos all night nerds ever. Oh well, I guess that's just the nature of an IT department, but come on! The whole office is sterile white cubicles in the middle of suburbia, totally lacking any kind of soul. The bright fluorescent lights along with the bright computer monitor are wrecking my eyes. Kind of ironic for a health insurance company to be doing that, eh? There are no friendships or socialing. In the whole time I've worked at this place, I've yet to go out to happy hour or go get beers after work with anyone from work. In prior jobs, that is how we unloaded the day, that is how we got to know each other.

There is no pride here. Someone else in another review summed it up - everyone here would rather work somewhere else. Other companies I have worked for in the past had tremendous amounts of pride, the employees worked hard to uphold the good name of their employer, it was an idea they identified with. Here - people feel like a number.

For being a health insurance company, they are really chintzy on their health benefits. Get rid of the consumer-driven plans, give me something real!

Advice to Senior Management

Give me something to work for and I will work like a machine to earn it. Right now you are giving me no clear target to work toward, so why should I continue to work hard?