Pros
- Good pay up-front; Equity + annual bonus part of compensation at certain levels. - Lots of PTO - 5 weeks starting out for certain levels - Mostly flexible work environment. Pre-COVID was typically 3-4 days in office, 1-2 days WFH. - Culture is, as a whole, fairly laid back. This is a good and a bad thing. Sallie Mae is a pretty easy company to coast at. The pay is nice and you generally won't find yourself working long hours throughout the week. The teams usually are dismissed early on holiday weekends, there were relatively frequent social events both during and off work hours while I was there.
Cons
Outside of the fact that Sallie Mae, as a company, exists primarily to shoulder people with insurmountable debt for large portions of their adult lives: - SAFe Agile...or what's left of it. Company was drifting back toward waterfall when I left. - Really badly structured IT department with unbalanced levels of power between groups. Miles of red tape to complete even the most minor of tasks. Lots of people here seem to have talked their way into positions they weren't qualified for. - Sallie Mae has retained most of the individuals responsible for creating the initial systems here, which are some of the absolute worst I've seen in my 10 years in this career field. This has led to a lot of people in high positions making really bad design decisions and further spaghetti-ing everything. - Architects here seems to exist just to spend the company's money on COTS stuff, which in-turn leads to a lot of shoehorning of unnecessary third-party tools. This heavily detracts from working through the degradation of the current systems and adds to the bloat. - Middle-Management is pretty lackluster. There are a lot of people in positions just because they've lasted long enough. I never felt like my boss really knew what I was doing or HOW I was doing. Frequent admissions during review time that the process was basically worthless and everything was pre-determined based on how the company did. - Very difficult to be seen here. Promotions seemed to be handed out seemingly at random. Low annual raises. - On-call rotation with basically no training; all production support is shared between teams who all work on completely different areas of systems. CONSTANT pressure to reduce on-call problems that are deeply, deeply ingrained in the systems and culture here. This became extremely intrusive into my personal life. - Very metrics-based. Not much focus on anything else, really. There were a lot more issues with this place. Management got completely shuffled around and there was a layoff at the end of 2020 that really compounded a lot of the issues listed above. The real frustrating thing is that there is definitely talent here but it is not utilized; most of the people who haven't left are just contributing to the rot.