Outside a few bright spots, the overall situation is pretty bad. In the US, compensation is weak, and if you join IT they’ll almost make you feel you should be “grateful” just to have a job. The internal narrative is that IT is a cost center to be minimized, and it shows: they’re aggressively offshoring roles to Colombia and India and outsourcing most development to third parties.
While there are still some smart, capable people around, many of the strongest people have already left. A lot of the management that remains fits the profile of the “chatty, nice, friendly” type with very shallow technical understanding, who simply stayed long enough and talked their way up. You now see people promoted into management after 18 years in the exact same role, which says a lot about how stagnant and insular parts of the organization have become.
On the technology side, software implementations are rushed, there’s no serious QA or real SDLC discipline, and quality clearly isn’t a priority. If you’re considering joining on the software/IT/technology side, you really need to think twice. It’s a highly political environment where performance doesn’t protect you — people who have generated millions in value have still been let go.
High performers and genuinely smart people often end up as targets because they expose incompetence, and advancement feels more about returning favors than about merit. On top of that, “inclusion” is sometimes applied in a way that feels forced, to the point where male candidates are openly rejected because hiring them wouldn’t help gender balance.
All of this is happening while the company is firing people across the board, yet the CEO continues to claim that everything is fine and the business is “resilient.” In reality, the IT organization has been cut down to the bare minimum and is operating in a severely weakened state.
So.. if you are considering joining IT, Digital or D&I... please do yourselves a favor and really think about it twice.
