I was hired in what was supposed to be a permanent, full-time role within their Internal IT department. This department consisted of 3 people--myself, 2 other people in Calgary.
I came into a completely broken Windows Environment. I rebuilt, redesigned and fixed all the problems in 5 short months. I brought back to life completely dead DC's, a dead W S U S environment and implemented and built a corporate image and deployment services with MDT. I gave them a migration path and initiated their migration from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10. 2 weeks prior to my 6 months probation, I was thanked for all of my hard work and told my services were no longer required.
The people in Calgary is a very knowledgeable Linux Systems Administrator but will not document or share any of their knowledge on any of the internal systems whatsoever. They sit in a corner of the office and treat internal requests like a pain in the behind and have 0 Windows knowledge whatsoever. All of their internal systems (with the exception of the Windows environment now, thanks to me) are at least 3-5 years out of date and no maintenance or upkeep is done on anything.
All equipment is out of date, some 7-10 years old. When you walk into their server room, it is wall-to wall desktops running server software. They don't use official vendors but order from Amazon and e bay and any order over $150 needs to be approved by the owner and CEO of Hitachi-ID.
The Calgary office is plastered with signs about respecting the environment you work in. IE, wipe your feet signs are prevalent everywhere. The owner is a former smoker, so there is anti-smoking propaganda at every corner to the extreme. IE, you are not allowed to use the elevator if you go outside for a smoke. One former employee described to me while I was there, and I quote "It's like going to Grandma's house."
I received no day to day direction or training. I came in as an IT Specialist and was given the "keys to the kingdom" so to speak but was never shown any systems or provided any documentation whatsoever. I was sent to Calgary for 3 weeks for training but spent the majority of that time cleaning the pig sty of an IT area and formatting computers. The people in Calgary spent a total of about half an hour one day of those three weeks running down the network infrastructure--all of which they did not seem to be 100% completely familiar with when posed with questions.
They are complete paranoid about telecommuting and have this attitude that anyone working from home is simply taking a day off, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary.
A broken bonus system that doesn't kick in until after 3 years with the company.
