Pros
Better than no job. Reasonably safe (for now) from layoffs and downsizing.
Cons
Incredible bureaucracy! Most of my time is spent on overhead that would be unnecessary at a normal company. To be fair, this is partly an unavoidable consequence of size, but AT&T sets a new standard. Thank god we are a monopoly! We'd never survive in a truly competitive environment. It make for a lot of drudgery. Low technology. Innovation, at least internally, is stifled. Corporate email accounts are limited to 35 MB! (You are supposed to download to your laptop/desktop and work out your own backup strategy). Laptops provided (even to tech workers) are 2+ year old technology. All internal IT systems are being herded to a one-size-fits-all architecture. Variations are punished with crushing amounts of paperwork, approvals, and other overhead that makes it almost impossible. Workers are slotted to do one thing---probably to set up their jobs for off-shoring. Hard to find anything on the internal web. The simplest things (e.g. checking vacation balance, signing up for mandatory training) can take an hour due to poorly designed internal systems. Telecommuting is strongly discouraged---even if most of your job is solo work and conference calls. I could go on. Why would any young, talented worker choose AT&T over, say, Google? Beats me. Most of the people I work with are older workers with 20+ years in and are hanging on until retirement.
