AT&T was a great place, pre-SBC merger
Pros
The team I worked with for over 12 years was amazing: we were from the "real AT&T" pre-merger with SBC, and all my fellow team members were great to work with. We had great benefits and pretty good telecommuting policies. We accomplished some really terrific work in the early 2000s, becoming a very forward looking team. We were doing a lot with very little.
Cons
When the merger with SBC happened, the whole culture of the company changed for the worse: SBC had an incredible amount of bureaucracy that increased exponentially. I went from 3 levels of management to around 15 in a day, and had three different managers in the span of 2 months. Work that should have taken weeks would stretch into months, as endless meetings would just rehash previous meetings. It became ridiculous. SBC used a software development process for EVERYTHING (and called it "Express," which made many of us laugh). They ended up laying off a lot of the people I worked with, and never understood the work we did (in fact, I was in several meetings where our contributions were ignored completely). We did six months of comparing different technologies for things like search engines and content management, and SBC's preferred solutions always won (my personal favorite was when it was decided to use SBC's search solution, even though AT&T's was superior on all fronts). Promotions basically stopped long before the merger, and nothing seemed to change after the merger. When I finally quit, my manager was more interested in knowing if my job could be outsourced, rather than why I was leaving. That was just icing on the cake.
