Your experience is manager/department dependent, but overall disappointing
Pros
- Depending on your team, you'll be exposed to some relevant technologies + gain some decent experience - Very good PTO and benefits - Allstate whole-heartedly embraced a remote/hybrid workplace, which was great to see and surprising for a large mega-corp - Had some very smart engineering co-workers, who were fun to work with and taught me a ton
Cons
To preface this, Allstate is a large company with many departments, so your experience is going to depend heavily on where you're placed. If you're considering a job there, grill your potential team + manager about WLB and engineering practices. That being said, my experience was largely negative: - A solid 80% of the work was fire fighting for older, business applications. On-call for my team was 24/7 with no rotation. Getting paged in was very frequent - The other 20% of the work is developing new services for partner companies. Most of these deadlines were promised to partners, by the business, without input from the engineers actually doing the work. This lead to many all-nighters for development + product releases, as well as large amounts of tech debt. - There is a large blame culture in place (at least for my department). If bugs are found, the focus is on identifying the person responsible and not on how to prevent similar issues in the future or improving processes. - Turnover is very high, which leads to a lot of lost business knowledge since documentation is practically non-existent - Pay is pretty bad. Your salary is definitely below market, and annual raises do not match inflation. The performance bonuses are also awful and do not match the amount of work required of you.
