A once great company that has fallen from grace.
Pros
Avaya generally has a very good work life balance. Work from is the norm, and the company uses its products to allow that to good effect. Generally a good wage and package. If you are a recent graduate, you will be paid peanuts and your scope to increase that wage is near zero. A lot of genuinely nice and talented people work there.
Cons
Doesn't feel like a cool place to work. Don't consider working here if you are a recent grad. There is still a hangover from the Nortel acquisition that no greasy fry-up could ever solve. I'm looking at you, CS1k. There is a very high average age, very little diversity. There are a LOT of people who are simply sitting around, waiting to retire, or even better: get paid off. The technology was great 15 years ago, but seriously lacking now. Avaya is INSANELY hard to do business with. So much red tape, process, and process on top of that. The funny thing is, if you somehow figure out a piece of the process and do it well, people regard you as a demigod. What's wrong with this? Well, entire processes need to be scrapped and re-thought. Customers want products on the same day, not in weeks. If you work in EMEA, you quickly find that your manager, and his manager are usually powerless to do anything tangible with your career / pay. Leadership and instructions come very much from Dubai and then ultimately controlled from the US. Far too many managers before I left. The last 3 years before I left were especially turbulent as leadership was brought in, made a mess of things, left, and the cycle repeated. Many botched external hires as management thought better than to promote internally. The company at the time of writing is / was in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Very hard to do business, little to no net new business in many regions. Who in their right minds does business with a company that has an uncertain future? There was a constant underlying threat of job loss over the 7 or so years that I worked there. Even top performers had that issue. It gets tiring. Very disjointed business relationships between Avaya and their Channel Partner resellers in Enterprise sales. The CEO and immediate executive leadership were completely unapproachable. The outgoing Kevin Kennedy was short-tempered and surrounded by minions who would feed him inaccurate information about how great things were. CEO (Chirico) isn't exactly a charismatic replacement from my prior experience of him. R&D spend on bizarre products continue to astound. Years and millions of dollars spent on hardware investment on products that sell in the hundreds. I'm looking at you, Flare, H175, E159 and Vantage. The R&D needs to be spent on simplification of the products and the ease of dropping them into the cloud. On that note: Avaya are SO slow to react to the market. Microsoft and the other big players are eating them alive. So much propaganda. All employees were asked to set up social media accounts and essentially spam all the channels, particularly twitter and LinkedIn. Internal communication is pointless: it's always 'everything is great, guys, we're landing so many deals, there's so much momentum'.
