Good Starter Job, But Don't Expect to Make a Career
Pros
Flexibility to work remote as needed. Free soda, coffee, and tea. Knowledgeable employees with lots of experience and are willing to mentor. This is a good place to start at and get experience, but as soon as you get 2-3 years under your belt, move on as quickly as you can. This is definitely not a company you can grow with unless you are an expert politician.
Cons
Politics. People are hired, promoted, and fired/laid off based on their ability or inability to play along with the politics versus doing a good job. Great work seems to be rarely rewarded while people who brown nose are consistently promoted. This hurts employee morale and causes good employees to leave. Also, there seems to be a noticeable amount of people who are not qualified for their positions, but were promoted based on their ability to brown nose. Due to politics, there is a fair bit of backstabbing. If you try to be helpful to a manager, expect it to be used against you. It is obvious which managers are not qualified for their jobs because the employees who are more knowledgeable and qualified are pushed out since the unqualified are scared their ineptness will be obvious. Usually these folks are holdovers from Datatel. When Datatel and SunGard Higher Education merged, it appears that the Datatel crew made sure to give themselves the ripe management positions. You can be penalized for being too good at your job. Some employees have been blackballed from moving into other positions because their manager didn't want to lose them. How is this helpful? All it does is incentivize employees to leave the company all together. Pay increases average about 2% for those in the field and on the ground. Management easily receives large bonuses for not really doing a whole lot. Needless requirement for employees to be in the office 60% of the time, which is strange for a technology solutions and software company. Company preaches a set of values but practices the polar opposite.