Local Companies / Employers / Employee Experiences

[Lars Rasmussen]

Decided to start a new thread building on the 'Increased Job Postings' posts...

I'd like to hear about other local companies from present and former
employees.  Here's a bit about me & mine:

In my present position(titled Computer Specialist 1) at Nature's
Sunshine Products, I'm expected to man the help desk for 3 hours a
day.  Not too bad really, considering I'm the new guy to IT (hired in
July 2006).  Good benefits(they even offer a health plan that is 100%
paid for by the employer that I opted for), good manager in the
Spanish Fork location that is close to my home in Springville.  Lots
of apparent nepotism as I've seen several others' relatives/family
members working there, but I got hired without a family connection.

>From my experience nepotism seems to be more prevalent in Utah Valley.

The organizational attitude seems to be hierarchical and less
knowledge centric.  There is a lot of tribal knowledge(unwritten
information that is not commonly known by others within a company) and
dependence upon individuals instead of emphasis on the value of
sharing information.

On the whole I feel I'm treated fairly there and enjoy working in
close proximity to my home in Springville.

A criticism I have is the company's tendency toward Windows-centric
environments.  Currently there is a lot of dependence on a
mainframe(Unisys) back end that is very loosely planned to be migrated
toward a Windows environment.  There are some Linux servers
there(running the help desk software & VMWare, for example), but the
prevailing attitude towards Linux seems to be antagonistic due to lack
of information and experience.

I find it difficult to answer some of the concerns and questions to
keep people informed re: Linux as well, because of the complexity of
the current environment.  I'm not a Windows Server expert(yet), and
questions of interoperability and migration between the 3 different
platforms often exceed my current knowledge.

--
Lars