Pros
Lots of hands on experience with an (admittedly outdated) fairly robust network that covers the gambit of tools someone in the Networking field would use. For better or worse, you'll end up doing a lot of things you'd never thought you'd do, which allows for a good amount of experience. Culture was, up until recently, one of camaraderie and there was good people working there.
Cons
Management is an absolute mess. In my nearly 2 years there I watched our CEO, VP, and multiple managers all leave because of the inability for the company to listen its customers nor its employees. It's very clear to see that no one there in management has any idea what they want to do with the company. They kept telling us that they wanted to move one direction, but they still kept services unrelated to that direction going and making next to no real progress towards their goals. The number of meetings I was a part of where I was told we're changing focus only to keep doing the same thing we were doing prior is countless. I honestly believe that there's significantly more money to be made for the Ven Cap investment firm that bought FRII, with this company failing than succeeding. The technology is probably one of FRII's biggest heels. Their infrastructure is decrepit, outdated, and on the brink of massive failure. The only reason there hasn't been a complete catastrophic failure is because they employed engineers that keep it up, despite very little benefit to them or the company. Their data center's power infrastructure is largely on the brink of collapse, their mail server is unable to handle the sheer amount of data it receives, their billing system has been broken in some capacity, and by the time I left, was breaking more and more to the degree where we couldn't take credit card payments from customers. The Ven Cap that owns this company refuses to invest anything into actually fixing these major issues, so much so that, over 2 years on, their online billing portal is still broken, leaving customers no choice but to either set up auto-pay or call into the office to pay. Again, management had told us over and over that a new system was going to be in place soon, but no system was ever implemented and still has yet to be. FRII simply exists off the backs of people who care significantly more about the company than anyone at the top does, but again, to no benefit to anyone involved. Compensation is an absolute joke for this industry. The amount of work that I and my colleagues had to do and the amount of red-tape and bureaucracy we had to endure was by no means equally compensated. Management seems to believe that they are entitled to our time and loyalty, and the second they feel that that loyalty has wavered, they're significantly more likely to fire you than listen to you. There's absolutely bottom-barrel benefits, no real sense of security, they can't even be bothered to compensate their on-calls with the pay they are required to give them. The overtime is a benefit, but only because they've been so short-handed it's basically a requirement. With such poor pay and poor working conditions, it's no wonder people have left and never looked back. What's more, the last time we had annual reviews, which were in September, we were promised our pay bumps by November. Those pay bumps never happened, and when September rolled around again, they told us that we'd receive our reviews on our anniversary dates. That left some of us almost a year out for even the promise of what would amount to likely nothing. This company does not care about its employee's talents, time, or work, something they have proven time and time again. FRII used to be a place that I could feel I was a valued member of the team, not just another cog in an ever bloated, ever failing machine. They lack the basic business sense to invest in themselves, they have an unclear focus on just what it is they want to do, they have no loyalty left in its employees, and the employees that are still there certainly don't wish to be. Between its lazy and corrupt management and its failing infrastructure, the fact that any well-meaning company or customer still associates with this company is astonishing to say the very least. On a final note, I want to make it abundantly clear that Garry Myall is not the CEO and hasn't been for some time. Garry, despite all his own warts, did show some amount of care and attention for this company, but the new CEO couldn't be bothered to show up until we all threatened to walk out on the company (that was indeed how bad things had gotten). The new CEO, just as upper management, has systematically lied and bolstered false hope, because again, he likely serves to make more money on FRII's failure than he does the company succeeding.
