IT Department: great lifestyle and challenging position
Pros
Lifestyle: Who can complain about living in Denver? You've got biking, skiing, camping, hiking and a plethora of mountain activities near by. It's a young state with lots of interesting people and a growing tech scene. I loved living in Denver while I worked for Dish. Pride: I was always proud to work for Dish. During my time there, we worked on one of the biggest billing system migrations ever. We deployed new work force management tools, managed an ERP for manufacturing and distribution, a CRM with 14 million subs, and managed a complex data network for OTT delivery and delivery of HD channels to uplink centers. Since I left, Mike McClaskey won the CIO of the year award. I can understand why after working under him for 2 years. Respect. Learning: All of these projects (mentioned above) required coming up to speed on enterprise development. Since our system supports live video for 14 million homes, downtime is not an option. I was challenged professional and intellectually regularly during my time in Denver
Cons
Benefits: The health care coverage provided by Dish was a joke. THe HR present the options to me, and I literally turned both of them down. One had a very high deductible and one had a low cap. Agility/Speed: If you want to do rapid prototyping in rails, then Dish isn't the place for you. Our projects move slowly because they involved MILLIONS of stakeholders (most of those being subscribers). Production releases are carefully planned and tested.