Pros
1 - Good pay compared to other places to work. 2 - I've had good raises in the past 3 - Most of the people here are very friendly 4 - Local management has been very responsive to me
Cons
1 - Very, very little training (if any) is available. This never seems to be a priority in the budget. How do they expect us to provide excellent customer service when so many people here don't have a clue what they are doing? 2 - Too much politics in the local office. 3 - One director has too much control and nobody ever questions his decisions. His direct reports are treated the same way. I gave up trying to introduce new ideas years ago because of this. 4 - This datacenter has always been very stingy when it comes to purchasing necessary hardware and software tools to do the job despite VERY HIGH (>40% !!!) net profit at this location. 5 - They didn't give a raise to anyone in the company nationwide in 2009 due to supposed bad financial performance. First, it doesn't make sense to penalize employees even at high-performing locations such as the one where I work... this only hurts performance because people aren't going to give 100% to a company that gives them nothing in return. Secondly, I've been following the press releases from Fiserv this year... and the initial bad financial performance was due to the sale (at a loss) of the insurance unit (Benefit Planners), but if you follow the press releases, you will see that we had phenomenal performance so far this year, even with the loss of the insurance unit. When Yabuki sent the e-mail announcing the suspension of raises, he blamed it on poor performance due to the banking meltdown... but if you read the press releases and other statistics, you can clearly see that it was due to the sale of the insurance unit!!! 6 - The "consolidation" plan. Fiserv is consolidating things such as network infrastructure management, file transmissions, etc. The plan is to consolidate our servers to a few locations around the country, but they are telling us that we will still run them from our location. However, from reading other blogs, you can see the trend toward outsourcing software development to India. Plus, they announced the closure of the Aurora, Illinois location because "these 200 customer service positions were no longer necessary" and then the very next week they announced the opening of a new location in Hickory, NC and boasted that it was going to create 400 new customer service positions!!! What kind of message does that send? The avg. salary in Aurora is about $45K. These new positions in Hickory avg around $25K. Hmmm... what do YOU think they are up to? Will I have a job in 5 years? Who knows? I could go on and on, but to summarize: Fiserv has been a great place to work for many years (I'm not going to give away how long I've been here to protect my anonymity), but things have changed since Jeff Yabuki has come on board. Les Muma and Norm Balthasar really cared about the employees... we were well taken care of. But this new bean-counter Yabuki only cares about the bottom line and his multi-million dollar bonus. He gives me the impression of one of those CEO's who uses short-sighted methods to boost the stock price so he can cash out just before the company crashes. Fiserv has performed very well for our share holders in the past... always giving double-digit returns... but Yabuki wants to change everything that has worked so well in the past and doesn't care about the employees he hurts in the process. Now is the time to start polishing your resume and getting additional training to make you valuable to other companies.
