Pros
As a "Craft" worker, the compensation was good, the benefits were great! You earned addt'l vacation weeks every 5 years of so, you had plenty of Sick Time, days off, health benefits, and you could get overtime or double-time pay if you were a "craft" worker. As a Craft worker you also had "shifts" which gave you an expected life balance where you knew when your job started for the day and when it ended. You didn't have to go home and worry that you might be called in or forced to work when you were at home with family. The same could not be said for Management positions. Luckily Avaya came from the AT&T era where 401k & Pensions existed for its Union workers, and they have some retirement funds built up if they took advantage of the 66c/$Dollar 401k contributions, pensions were removed for management however.
Cons
The Company Values began to slide when Silverlake/TPG purchased Avaya and turned them into a company that doesn't value the contribution of its employees, nor does it value its customers. You could be the star worker and hold a huge knowledge-bank with key company processes and be gone tomorrow! The management is more interested in impressing industry peers with gadgets like "call center video chat" for instance, but not have the hardware, let alone the "need" for doing it with its everyday customers. The company focus is scattered. They can hire a group of engineers in Argentina for instance that work on one significant product area, and let them all go in one fell swoop, leaving customers hanging with no one else in the company proficient in that product area. Avaya shoots first, and asks questions later, and they have never been a proactive company, but a straggler who has to correct its mistakes for not doing it right the first time around. Resources are wasted and customers are let down. Customers pay more, but get less everyday. Competitors should be wise on this and fill the "lack of customer service" gap. Avaya Business Partners should focus on taking the "service/maintenance" aspects away from Avaya, as it is being outsourced to foreign markets making technical-talk even more difficult , along with no regard for the customer's time-zone. All customers are currently being forced to go strictly to the Web for ticketing. You can't or aren't allowed to "talk" to someone at Avaya, even if you pay hundreds & thousands of dollars each year to them in Maintenance Contracts. The customer is literally pushed away and faced with the aspect of holding onto huge amounts of expensive hardware/software systems, with decreasing customer support and wondering if they should just forklift & dump it all and go with Cisco?