Pros
**I was going to rate Ascension 2 stars but I see a lot of suspicious 4 and 5 star reviews were spammed on the page after the layoffs were announced, so I am rating 1 star to balance out.** This used to be a great place to work...laid back environment, good coworkers, and pay was at least ok, if not competitive, depending on what market you’re in. Benefits were also good until they started cutting back, although the dental and 403b are still competitive relative to the rest of the industry. If you want that kind of environment and can get hired by a local ministry operation or care site, you can probably have a low-stress day to day. Pay will be low but you won’t be asked to do much and will be rewarded for going above and beyond. The national ministry is great if you are lazy, incompetent, burned out, or otherwise seeking an easy paycheck. Ascension would rather reward a brown-noser who punches the clock for 5 years over someone who works hard for 2, so as long as you keep your head down and do the bare minimum you’ll do great. Ascension also doesn’t seem to mind if you lie about your credentials or cheat in interviews so feel free to be as unscrupulous as possible. Just don’t try to be an exceptional employee or you will end up overworked, underpaid, and disrespected.
Cons
The C-suite is obsessed with squeezing every dollar of cost savings out of the organization as possible on the auspice of insulating against COVID-19 (despite announcing they have several billions in their nest egg). At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, they announced their commitment to protecting employees and the integrity of the healthcare systems to the press, then proceeded to increase hours, cut pay, increase insurance premiums and decrease coverage (I saw colleagues with family members who needed intensive therapy for disabilities suddenly get all their therapy sessions cut off), and freeze compensation for everyone but themselves. They promised this would protect job security, then outsourced hundreds of IT jobs to India in the next quarter. All of this while helping themselves to several millions in bonuses. Very traditional “top dog eats first” culture, as implied by the above paragraph. Project and personnel management frequently take credit for work done by their employees. Don’t expect any sort of career advancement. Carrot-dangling is pretty common, and expect to be met with bullying and gaslighting should you ever try to collect the carrot. You worked nights and weekends for months to ensure an on-time project delivery? “Well technically no one asked you to work overtime” - even though you were put on an understaffed project with an aggressive timeline. You’ve exceeded expectations on performance plans for the last three years? “Well technically no one promised you a promotion, so “practice gratitude”’ - and don’t expect a raise beyond a cost-of-living adjustment. Expect to be told “If you don’t like it, leave. Good luck finding a job in this economy though, lawl.” if you complain about these things. Rampant racism and sexism. I am a credentialed and experienced software developer, yet I was frequently made to do coordination and analyst work because I am a white man and our business partners did not want to work with women or “people with accents”, and I was also assumed to be a less capable coder than my “accented” counterparts. I also saw many female senior engineers and PMs presumed to be technically inept, and were tokenized and reduced to glorified administrative aides. As such, burnout is common in high performers as they will squeeze every bit of work out of you that they can. Project managers only exist to glad-hand with the business and don’t manage priorities so expect to be called in on nights, weekends, holidays, and PTO to handle “emergencies” (which is usually just some executive complaining about the color of his report). There’s no top-down strategy for basically anything so expect projects to pivot on a dime, with no thought given to timelines or planning.