Pros
Perot Systems aka Dell Services, does practically all the IT for Harvard Pilgrim, whose business is very very solid. The pay check will not bounce. There is not much separation between the Harvard Pilgrim people, the Dell people, and the contractors. I was a contractor. The company is very parent friendly, and has a much larger fraction of technical women and technical members of minorities (such as Black and from India) than other places I have worked. Colleagues are very friendly and help one another.
Cons
The commute to Wellesley is stall-and-crawl almost every day. Most people I interacted with were contractors and the change in personnel was rapid and ongoing. It's a job, not a career. Computer software was viewed very much as a commodity. Knowledge of any particular system was not valued. Rules for health insurance are made difficult and complex for no good reason I could determine. If I were a doctor trying to comply with what insurance would support it would drive me nuts. Security was managed as an impediment. People usually were not given the access they needed to do their jobs, for many months and years. The software was archaeic. Windows XP in 2011! The machines locked up multiple times a day, possibly due to some of the disk encryption software. Lots of essential knowledge was never written down. You had to know the right person to ask, and often had to ask them more than once in different ways before they would admit to knowing what you needed to find out.. Since most people expected to be laid off, having exclusive knowledge might save a person's job, but that made it hard on anyone else who needed to know.
