Q&A With National Education Association Employees

The number and types of problems to solve - the NEA is a time capsule of technical and interpersonal disasters left from the 1980s to the 2000s, and there is virtually no management to tell you what to work on. Once you are here for a while and people know you, you can pitch in wherever you like!

A solid developer with Scrum and TDD experience who is diverse in modern technologies such as Mulesoft, microservices, and Amazon RDS.

Industry standard, more or less

No more than an hour, probably half that.

It was low-stress, but somewhat embarrassing; the team ran out of questions before finding out what I could do, so I spent most of the interview asking them what their problems were and how they were solving them. It was months after being hired before they found out what I could do.

Answer every question confidently and in detail, whether you know the answer or not. Example: "what is a constructor?" "constructors are very important in many programming languages because allocating memory leads to [just keep talking]" The reason is that the interviewers are required to read vetting questions from a script, and probably don't understand the questions they are asking. There may be a technical expert in among the interviewers, but they only get one vote, while every interviewer will remember whether you were poised and confident.

Not at all, in the job I was hired to do. Fortunately, there are all sorts of jobs left undone, if you are inquisitive and take the initiative.

Glacial unless there is a crisis, when it becomes paralysis-by-analysis. Fortunately, you can work at your own pace most of the time.

The unofficial network of people who get things done. Fun people!

Maintain a visible association with the Democratic Party and progressive causes, especially those that pertain to public schools.

Networkers. The formal organization is dysfunctional, but the staff has an inner core of smart people with good character who make the actual decisions, and if you tap into them they'll look after you.

If you go out and get your own feedback, you won't get any. That's sort of a plus - there are plenty of good people among the staff to elicit feedback from.

If you like to pitch in and help, the place is a blast. Every day is a new crisis, and you never know what management is going to do.

The hours allow for a social life, but commuting takes a toll on people with families who live in the suburbs. The NEA is close to good locations for young singles.

Non-existent, in the IT organizations, at least.

Very rarely, it's a union scale except few step and no COLA increases.

Fairly secure, it being a union and all. OTOH, management is halfheartedly trying to lay off a few dozen people.

Both. More than 10% of staff are getting downsized, and contractors are replacing most of them. In addition, some projects are being off-shored; in the unlikely event that those projects succeed, much of engineering and operations will end up in Asia.

Upper management's lack of interest in what employees are doing. They simply don't care about making the organization more productive, or even exploiting workers. They are all about managing budgets and contributing to political campaigns.

Poor. The outcome of the Janus Supreme Court case is expected to cost the NEA a lot of revenue, and management is proactively laying off employees as a result. Management is at the same time spending huge sums on outside consulting firms, sending a different message to employees.

The employees are diverse by any measure; however, the higher you go up the management chain, the more straight white males you'll find.

Senior-level employees tend to get solo offices, and there is adequate space for conference and team rooms. On the other hand, the office furniture, lighting, and carpets have not been updated since the 1980s, and the office equipment is over a decade obsolete.

Pre-Obamacare health insurance premiums. In practice, it is equivalent to at least $10k per year, in some cases, over $20k.

Industry average. However, roles/job titles only go up to the "Senior" level; for example there are "Architect" jobs.

Very good, but aging - very few young engineers are hired. Management seems to be hoping that if they can keep the lights on long enough, problem employees (which is all of them) will retire and be replaced by robots.