Pros
There are people within CoBank who are motivated by the mission.
Cons
I have been at CoBank’s Technology division (TDI) through 2025, and in that time the culture has been nothing short of toxic. The TDI leadership is running the department through fear and constant turmoil. Firings happen without warning, and a sense of job insecurity looms over every project. I, and others, have experienced verbally harsh behavior from leadership. This creates a climate where people are afraid to speak up or deliver bad news. Favoritism and cronyism are rampant. The CIO and TDI leadership has surrounded themselves with an inner circle of loyal “generals” (many of them referrals from previous companies, not even based in Denver) who can do no wrong. They get most of the big bonuses, promotions, and praise, while everyone outside that circle gets scraps. There is a very real caste system here, a biased environment with an “elite” group of entrenched favorites that will never make space for newer employees. Junior and mid-level folks have no clear career path or growth opportunities because all the advancements are reserved for those in the club. Managers blatantly favor their chosen few, and it’s demoralizing to the rest of us. Meanwhile, turnover is high and a ton of hard-earned domain knowledge has walked out the door, but upper management doesn’t seem to care beyond protecting themselves. Accountability is one-way: blame flows downhill. When unrealistic initiatives (defined by non-technical leaders) fall behind schedule or fail, leadership looks for scapegoats among individual contributors. I’ve seen people with solid performance get fired, in my view, not due to their work quality, but to “cover” for overpromised projects that upper management couldn’t deliver. It’s rarely the CIO or the hand-picked generals who take responsibility. Rather, it’s the rank-and-file who get burned. They will terminate employees not for true performance issues, but as sacrificial cover when deadlines slip or budgets blow out. And those same higher-ups pat themselves on the back and continue hoarding rewards at the top. It’s beyond demoralizing to watch. As one review already pointed out, “dysfunction is rewarded and dissent punished” a perfect summary of TDI’s leadership model. The company talks a big game about values and inclusion, but in practice management closes ranks to protect their own. CoBank would rather invest in beefing up its legal defenses than in a transparent career development framework for employees. If you’re not in the favored circle, you’re basically on your own. HR is no help (the HR department here is widely regarded as awful) because they ultimately answer to the same executives and will defend them at all costs. I’ve seen situations where legitimate employee concerns were brushed under the rug, while higher-ups facing complaints got blank-check legal support. It’s clear that leadership cares more about insulating themselves from any consequences than addressing the toxic environment they’ve created. On the technology side, the mismanagement is staggering. The top leaders in TDI are not deeply technical, yet they dictate architectural requirements that make little sense for an organization of our size. They seem to choose whatever trendy tool or framework they just heard about at a conference, regardless of actual need. We’re not dealing with Google-sized scale here, not even close, yet they’re shoving in ultra-complex, expensive solutions as if we were operating at web scale. For example, they invested in building out nearly every solution with an AWS-hosted application or service (there is rarely ‘build vs buy’, mostly ‘build’, even when it is exponentially more expensive to build and maintain every solution ourselves) with a highly restrictive and fragile DevOps pipeline along with a large-scale data lake initiative, absolute overkill for our modest data and transaction volumes. These decisions aren’t about solving CoBank’s problems; they’re about letting leadership play with cool tech toys to polish their resumes and egos. It’s technology for vanity, not for value. This misplaced priority has real costs. Leadership blows huge chunks of the budget on shiny new AWS services and AI platforms that hardly anyone in the bank actually uses, while core tools and customer needs are neglected. It’s unbelievable that they’d risk something that seemingly impacts customers just to toy around with the latest tech buzzwords. It shows a complete lack of judgment and respect for the business we’re supposed to be supporting. The much-vaunted “transformation” initiatives are largely fluff. They brag about implementing DevOps best practices yet they don't truly exist in practice and deployments are still manual, brittle, and require heroics from engineers. The leadership regularly gives rosy updates about progress on these fronts, but everyone is too scared to question them even when they know they are misleading. Folks elsewhere in the bank are starting to realize that TDI’s emperor has no clothes. All the fancy terminology and dashboards can’t hide the outages and delays. When a customer-facing service went down and transactions reportedly couldn’t be processed, it should have been a fire-drill level incident. Instead, there was basically silence from our leaders. No serious post-mortem, no urgency to prevent it happening again. It’s as if they hoped nobody would notice. Of course, investigating would mean admitting mistakes on their part, and why do that when they can spend that time preparing for flying to another tech conference or self-congratulatory presentation? All of this has left employee morale in the gutter. Many of us in the trenches feel voiceless and disposable. We see a pattern where doing good work means little unless you’re part of the clique. New ideas, feedback, or any pushback on the senseless decisions are either ignored or seen as disloyalty. It’s a tragedy because there are great people here who believe in CoBank’s mission and could drive real improvement, but they’re being stifled or driven out. This review might be anonymous, but it represents a chorus of frustrated voices. We’re tired of the fear, tired of the favoritism, and tired of leadership’s negligence that actively harms the safety and soundness of the bank and its customers.