If you are placed on the inside wire team, do yourself a favor and just quit on the spot and continue your job search. The inside wire team is irredeemable. It is the biggest team in the company (inside wire has been split into 3 separate teams that all do the same job), has the highest volume of any other team in the company, and coincidentally also has the lowest paid/lowest experienced workers in the building. This leads to an extremely high stress environment for anyone on this team.
Picture this: a new project facilitator (PF) gets hired on the inside wire team and goes through training. Now they slowly take on easy cat6 installations to get them going. As they work jobs and get more experience, they get trained on how to manage fiber optic cabling projects. At this point they are expected to be well rounded and have enough experience to manage a full workload (around 45 jobs at once). Now picture that the people who have been on this team the LONGEST have only been here for 1-2 years. The turnover is extremely high, so the new hires are sucking up all the easy jobs, leaving you, the "experienced" PF with 7 whole months of work under your belt, to take on all the difficult projects. Your project list grows more and more unmanageable, and the constant micromanaging from your immediate supervisor has gotten unbearable. Now on top of this, CenturyLink (who Concert Technologies is working on behalf of) is constantly emailing you and CCing your boss for updates on projects, because they haven't gotten a full status on one of your 40-some orders in the last 24 hours.
None of this scenario is made up. This all happens at Concert Technologies every day. So let me sum up these cons for you in a simple list.
- LOW PAY (management has said in a response to another reviewer that the pay is fine because you are making more than the local Roy Rodgers cashier!)
- You will not receive ANY benefits until you have worked here for 90 days. NO PTO, NO HEALTHCARE, and NO 401K (most people quit before this day arrives anyways)
- You cannot receive 401k benefits until you have been with the company for A WHOLE YEAR. (almost no one makes it this long on the inside wire team)
- Extreme micromanagement over your time and organizational strategies. You are actually forced to organize your emails in a certain way.
- Arbitrary performance metrics. They will judge your performance based on how many jobs you schedule in a given week without taking any factors into consideration (like how all the new people absorb the easiest jobs)
- I have heard multiple times from supervisors that the Vice President of the company actively pays attention to the amount of jobs each PF has scheduled for the day (rather than focusing on bigger picture company goals)
- No sick leave. Only 2 weeks of PTO per year. Only 6 holidays per year.
- You are forced to take a 1 hour lunch, so you are at the facility for 9 hours a day, or more.
- Unrealistic expectations from CenturyLink and your direct supervisors. They have arbitrary metrics that they expect you to follow and as you can guess, the timeframe that you are expected to preform tasks is extremely small. When you get a new order dropped on your workload, you are expected to have that order scheduled within 48 hours. This is completely unreasonable for a variety of factors and every employee knows it, but the bosses will defend it backwards and forwards. If you do not meet the 48 hour deadline, CenturyLink will demand an update from you every day, for every order, so you can explain to them exactly why you are behind on their insanely short deadline.
- Office layout. Don't expect to get an office. Don't even expect to get a cubicle. Your workstation is comparable to a voting table with the cardboard dividers.
- Even if you get lucky and are placed on another non inside wire team, you can still expect to have some inside wire jobs on your to-do list. Yes that's right. The company seniority thought it would be a good idea to start throwing some inside wire jobs at other employees on other teams in the building to compensate for the overwhelming amount of projects that Concert Technologies will not turn away. They will mentally rip their employees through the shredder and back before they will turn away a small cabling project.
- Concert Technologies actually stays open when their contract provider is off work. CenturyLink is off on Christmas Eve, yet the faithful inside wire employees will be marching into work with nothing to do but stare at their screens for 3 hours before being graciously released at 11am and cornered into using PTO.
- If you do well enough at your job, they will promote you to a mentor project facilitator, so that means that you will be training a new employee and answering their questions on top of your day to day work, except you get no extra money for doing so. Congrats on the promotion!
- In a bad part of town so enjoy dodging drug addicts and homeless people on your way to grab lunch. Also there is a halfway house directly across the street where there are constantly shady people hanging around. At least they have controlled access into the building (which only breaks occasionally).
