Pros
The compensation was more than comparable with other companies for similar positions. The majority of the people I worked with were great to work with. I saw this in other departments too, it seemed like every group was its own family of sorts. I was in IT, and we had a very diverse group of people. There were some of the classic "IT nerds", but that certainly wasn't the rule, or even the majority - which is nice for bringing different ideas to the table and just making work a more interesting place in general. It was exciting working in such a huge company with enormous resources. Getting to work with technology operating on that scale was amazing. Nationwide has an awesome amount of sophisticated technology, and they don't seem to mind putting it to use, on the infrastructure side at least. They try to do things the right way, as far as system maintenance, security, QA, and things like that go. They may fall short in some areas, but they really make a sincere effort to follow best practices, which is nice after working so many places that tend to be overly lax and unconcerned with doing things the "right" way. While there are a number of people that aren't terribly useful or proficient, there doesn't seem to be too much "amateur hour" going on here, at the architecture and policy levels at least. Work-life balance was very good, in my role at least. I had on call duties every couple of months, but only a few times did this cause me to have to put in any significant amount of time after normal work hours. I worked late at times, but not normally, and it was only requested on very few occasions. My experience is far from universal, it depends on what area that you are in - a buddy of mine regularly works seven days a week, although he is able to "work" from home very often as well. All in all, it's not a bad place to work depending on where in the company you are and what is important to you. I can only speak specifically about my department and the things that I've seen from working with other groups. Your mileage will certainly vary depending on where you are in the company.
Cons
Lack of opportunity for advancement or movement is the major, number one problem for me. This is what eventually drove me to leave. The company likes the practice of bringing new people in as contractors, and then, eventually, filling full time slots with these contractors when they open. So there's a real mobility problem - contractors are brought in from outside only, and if there's an open position, it will usually be filled with a contractor already in that department, and then a new contractor will be brought in from outside. While Nationwide boasts about career opportunities, I did not see many of these in my five years there. It may very well be different in different parts of the company, so I can only speak for the department that I was in, but I saw very few people move out of my department in any way (promotion or lateral) to another position in the company. What I did see was many people putting in time there, determining that they didn't want to do this for the rest of their lives and that they weren't going anywhere, despite the career opportunity propaganda, and leaving. Beyond that, there are a couple of issues. With the company in general, or at least IT at the company in general, everything tends to be very silo-ed. It has been a big push from Senior Management to address this, and they claim a large degree of success, but I'm not so sure that their observations are all that close to reality on this one. Different groups are loathe to talk to each other. While there are some excellent people out there that understand the benefit of everyone working together to accomplish the same goal, these people are unfortunately the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, trying to get any information or assistance from another department in IT tends to seem like banging your head against the wall, except with less possibility of reward. Things are very opaque. Information on how systems work that you don't already have is very difficult to come by. Sometimes the team in charge of that system will have some documentation, and sometimes they won't. The challenges you face with that are 1) finding out who is responsible for the system in the first place, and 2) getting them to respond to you at all - see the previous point. There's a big push to "do more with less". Which translates into concrete language as fewer people (layoffs, and not replacing people lost to attrition), less pay (people starting in the job that I was hired on into now start making about 10% less, plus now many new-hires are being offered a newly created, yet-lower-paying position (with essentially the same responsibilities) instead, and have to work to be promoted back to the old entry-level), reduced benefits, supply shortages, and making due with inadequate equipment. This has also lead Senior Leadership to institute some cost-saving measures that may look good on paper, but are divorced from reality when you factor in lost productivity. Senior management seems fairly divorced from the actual ground level things going on with the company in general. The management layer of the company is so enormous, so deep, as to boggle the mind and leave one to wonder in amazement how anything ever gets done. Indeed a lot of things don't get done very fast. The pace of things at Nationwide in general would be what I would describe as "glacial". If you want something to get done, if you're waiting for something to get done, prepare to wait a lot longer. IT specifically tends to try to buck this trend, instead going too far in the other direction, where things are done too fast and thus cause all manner of unexpected, and sometimes serious, consequences. Communication left quite a bit to be desired. We did get all kinds of communication from senior leadership letting us know about general company information which, while interesting, didn't do anything to help us perform our jobs. What we lacked was communication from other teams, whose systems we supported, interacted with, or relied upon. Too many times we'd have a massive outage, only to find out later that it was due to a scheduled update to something that no one was made aware of. Coworker, and unfortunately in some cases management, competence was not always the best, either. There are some really fantastic, intelligent people working there, but unfortunately (especially with the do-more-with-less approach), there are some people that are basically dead wood, offering nothing, dragging teams down, and making a bad impression with other teams. This is especially bad if one of these people is your manager. Lastly, and this is likely specific to my area, is lack of respect from management. Often times I felt like we were seen as unruly school children instead of IT professionals. Sadly, some of the people they chose to hire in seemed to encourage management to have that view of us (which goes back to coworker competence and "do-more-with-less"). Management fostered a real grade-schoolish atmosphere. They would put up bulletin boards about customer service or the company values (instead of, say, the letters of the alphabet or something). They would regularly hand out cross word puzzles and word searches as combination training / morale boosting activities. There a major update to our main support tracking tool, and they adopted a "Safari" theme and put cut out pictures of wild animals on the walls with tips on how to use the tool (which was not difficult anyway). It is fairly demoralizing when you're trying to be a professional and take pride in your work, and management treats you like an idiotic child. Plus, management above the level of your direct manager, does not tend to to have much respect or concern for the people in the trenches.