7 June 2013
Customer Systems Response
12yComments from Steve A
Firstly, please see http://www.customersystems.com/employeefeedback
[Financially rewarded very well for a miserable existence.
I worked at Customer Systems full-time for more than 3 years]
My advice is, if you ever again find yourself having a miserable existence, don't stay there for 3 years. Move sooner and make everyone happy.
[Pros – Good pay.
High levels of client responsibility.
Perform much more senior roles, much earlier in your career than you would elsewhere.]
As we promise
[There is a difference between being thrown in at the deep end, and being blindfolded, hands tied behind your back and thrown off a cliff. This is not always recognised.]
We do 'drop people in the deep end' and we are clear about this. It is very rare that our people sink and of course the help of a manager is only ever a phone call away.
One guy, who joined us straight from uni, did the training in half the allotted time and commenced work on his 4th Monday with us handling a project by himself in the US. You probably aren't he.
I cannot accept that we blindfold people. That would imply that we deliberately prevent them seeing what is going on at a client. Not only would that be silly, but it also sounds impossible
I cannot accept that we tie people's hands behind their backs. That would imply that we deliberately prevent them helping clients.
If you felt like you were being thrown off a cliff, then you probably weren't as ready for your first assignment as we thought you were.
[Expected to have zero social life.]
Almost everyone who joins is interviewed by me and I make clear that the travel can be quite arduous. It is not unusual to be flying to site late Sunday or early Monday and getting home late on Friday.
Having said that, I did this same job myself at the start of my career and, for me the tradeoff was worth it. I had to build a social life wherever the site was but I got to travel to places I might never have visited otherwise (Saudi Arabia, South Africa etc)
and, in my early twenties I was able to speak with authority to senior people well over twice my age and solve their problems for them.
[Expected to abide by a preposterous dress code.]
Yeah . That must have hurt.
[Expected to abide by a series of unwritten & unspoken rules.]
Welcome to life. That's how the world works. That's how businesses work. That's how marriages and relationships work.
[Open and honest communication is frowned upon. Instead a web of rumours is preferred.]
My suggestion, not that you were asking me for one, is that next time you want to know something, detach yourself from the rumour mill and ask a director to spend a few minutes answering your questions. You might be pleasantly surprised at what kind of conversation ensues.
At company conferences, I give more time to answering the provocative questions than the anodyne ones because I find them more interesting.
[Pay/Bonus/Promotion system is absurd.]
Employees frequently tell me we pay well, so I don't understand the problem here.
[Advice to Senior Management – I could write whatever I wanted here with 100% confidence it would be ignored.]
On the annual personnel review form, we ask people to share their thoughts as to how we can run the company better. This is not intended to be a promise that we will agree or necessarily act on suggestions - It is simply asking for a generous sharing of your ideas.
Most of the ideas this prompts are ones we don't agree with and many of them are, at least to our way of thinking, commercially naive.
That's not really a great surprise. We've run a successful business here for nearly 16 years and I've been running successful IT businesses on and off since I was 24 (30 years ago).
By contrast, our intake is generally of very bright, very academic, very technically orientated people in their early twenties who have little commercial experience.
However, I must stress that just occasionally this question elicits an answer which is startling in its usefulness and which we adopt as standard procedure.
[No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company]
Yogi Berra said, "Prediction is very hard - especially of the future." I don't have a crystal ball.
What I can say is that we've been in this market for 15.5 years and, during that time, we've seen a lot of competitors fade away or end up in the hands of liquidators with the remnants sold for a pittance.
Those competitors were not run by fools or lazy people. In some cases, they were lauded as the latest and greatest star to follow until somehow they suddenly weren't.
In the first 15 years of our existence, we have generated a total pre-tax profit of just under £26 million. The tax man hasn't done badly either.
That said, business fluctuates. In 2012 we shrank. In 2013 we are growing.