Pros
OK, this really depends on where you work and what you do. Agents will have an entirely different, and better, experience than employees. Pros... most of the pros are gone. I've been with the company for nearly 14 years and in that time they've gutted most of the benefits, pension, health insurance, and stability. If I had to pick a pro... If you're an agent and sell well -- or if you're from a legacy family that sold well -- you're a god at NYL. We do get seven half-day Fridays in the summer, but when you're working 60+ hours a week and pressured not to take them, it's just not the benefit it used to be. I would say my pay is good, but I don't live in NYC so I can't say how they pay compared to other NYC companies. Decent bonus every year.
Cons
OK, Cons. When I started here in 2000 this was the best company I'd ever worked for. Today, not so much. We've been in the middle of layoffs for the past three years and they're telling us they're laying off more than ever before starting Jan, 2015 through about 2018-2020 as they revamp their technology department. Boy, does it need revamping, but six to eight years of working under the threat of layoffs takes its toll. Pension was cut two years ago. Health insurance was cut last year. Work-at-home was in wide use but then taken away from most who were not VPs -- and even many lower level VPs lost it. I kind of agreed with this, but I saw managers abuse this more than employees. What was a standard 37.5 hour work week (7.5 hours a day) is now more like a 60 hour work work since about 2009 and it looks like they plan to continue to demand such hours for a long time. This company used to have a good life/work balance mindset but that changed along with the changing of the CEO. This likely depends on the department you're in and the job you do. We finally moved from Windows XP to Windows 7 THIS YEAR. That tells you how little NYL valued staying up with technology. As someone else mentioned, we still develop using VB6 (Visual Basic 6) and use other versions of software we were using when I came on board about 14 years ago. Raises tend to be 1-2%, but NYL has been that way since I started. Ill conceived multi-million dollar projects are started and scrapped after a couple of years because of poor planning and execution. Sometimes more than once for the same goal. It's a good thing we have several billions of dollars to burn. Management likes to tell us that we have the power of "distributed leadership" and that we should speak up, but NYL has never had that culture and no matter how often they say it, it doesn't make it true. Things change very slowly here (and I've worked for other companies this size) and the speech rarely reflects reality.
