By far one of the biggest drawbacks is their feelings on remote work. They at first seemed quite alright with the idea of going with a hybrid approach to work, but I've heard from enough people that this is changing, and they will likely be forcing people to be fully in the office within the next year or two. Many of the folks I know prefer a full-remote approach, but were willing to accept a world where they had to go in a couple days. This outdated idea of needing to be in the office is a major downside, especially for jobs that nearly everywhere else can be found being done fully remote. The technology stacks that are used in IT are in one of two lanes. Either the technology is heavily outdated, or the technology being used to develop new apps is low code, and not designed to fit the needs or a large corporate enterprise like Erie. There seems to be this delusional idea that somehow products like Mendix are the next big thing, but it is severely limiting, and doesn't enable engineers to learn real coding. These low code environments are designed for small companies, and using them forces a dependence that will ultimately hurt Erie in the long run. Erie is unbelievably bloated by management. At any given time, there can be upwards of 5-6 layers of supervisors, managers, directors, vice presidents, senior vice presidents, executives, and ultimately the CEO. This is completely unnecessary, and much of these layers could be removed entirely, without any real detriment to the company. In IT, the main concern is that many of these managers come from non-technical backgrounds, but are ultimately the ones making technical decisions, which is utterly ridiculous. Promotions within the company are quite pitiful. Often times, there is usually only a singular promotion from a standard position to a senior one, and that is about it. For IT there is also a Master role, but this is pretty much impossible to get unless one of the current Masters decides to retire or leave the company. This ends up resulting in extremely sub par pay increases, with many people earning far less than the market average in software engineering. Erie has over the years gravitated more towards using contractors as a means of employment, especially in IT. Some of the contractors they hire are great, and some them are horrendous, to the point where it is essentially a coin flip whether your contracted co-worker is going to be a good employee or completely useless. This reliance contract engineer also undermines their narrative of wanting to be great for the Erie community, as many of the excellent engineers they have had that were local have left because of the remote work and pay issues mentioned above. In regards to the Pension, I had mentioned that this could be viewed as a slight negative. While this is a very nice perk, and they are correct in that many companies simply do not offer this anymore, this ends up being a justification for them to not try and make things better, because they feel that this benefit ought to outweigh most people's gripes with the company, leaving the executive team complacent. They fail to realize that paying vastly under the market average for IT positions leaves newer employees little reason to stay, as the marginal gains from leaving for higher pay early on in their career vastly outstrip any benefit that a pension would have (and this is of course assuming that those young employees will actually get a pension, assuming it isn't nuked in the coming decades).
