Pros
HR, despite their business role as representatives of a reprehensible company, is a positive experience. They and other corporate staff suffer from the same atrocious management and ridiculous staff turnover rates, however in spite of this, are kind and receptive and interact with you in a positive manner both on and off the record. Project managers are also a bright spot. Most do not have much or any technical or project management experience, however they seem to be motivated, personable, and willing to attempt to bridge the gap between engineers, the customer, and an otherwise insane management tree. Benefits and pay are acceptable, relatively industry standard; you have to negotiate for good pay, but that's true of any job.
Cons
> Incumbent subcontractors in single-point roles were not picked up, being told only direct hire positions would be filled and losing large swaths of historical knowledge. Within the first 6 months, nearly all new hires were subcontractors due to inability to fill positions. > All incumbent staff interested in being hired were required to submit copies of their most recent pay stubs to HR prior to any discussions about potential positions. This is the first major interaction with the company you receive. > No incumbent staff received an interview prior to offers being made. All initial position offers made simply matched the pay stubs submitted to HR. Staff that did request interviews were given 'discussions' with hiring managers or corporate staff instead of actual technical interviews. At no point are staff interviewed for a technical position, because Phacil does not have the technical depth to interview for the positions they pick up on contracts and does not want to pay the cost to hire engineers who do. > All staff were required to send detailed emails to their direct management describing what their job role consisted of and what the technical requirements for the position were, as well as listing any and all technical qualifications they may currently have that is relevant to the role. Despite having this information, open positions currently posted directly on the corporate website have completely incorrect technologies and information listed for multiple positions. Requisitions are repeatedly re-posted with incorrect information, despite multiple engagements with management. These positions are also removed and re-posted every few weeks to hide the age of the opening. >Our Federal customer dismissed/fired the first two Program Managers before the contract was a week old. They also dismissed/fired the 3rd within the first 6. Most management staff that are internally supplied from Corporate (and not outside hires) are simply transitioned to other contracts and not fired from the company. This particular contract is currently operating on the 6th Program Manager in the first 9 months (it should be noted # 5 was actually promoted out of the role internally and not dismissed by the customer, unlike the others). > As a small company, Phacil has a core group of employees with direct ties to the top of the organization. Most of these employees have secret employment contracts and/or ownership stakes in the organization, and as such, cannot be terminated. They're usually given senior management or program management positions in the company, and if/when they are dismissed by the customers or create too many problems on the contract, they are relocated to another contract or to corporate headquarters. These employment contracts and ownership stakes are directly advertised by more than one manager in frequent attempts to highlight how successful they are to their subordinates. > When an ongoing issue crops up for a particular project or system, Phacil brings in teams of 'experts' to help with short staffing, or mitigate issues. These self and management advertised experts have supposed knowledge in Networking, Storage, VMware, Windows, and a vast array of related technologies. They sound awesome. In reality, these experts are actually subcontractors, not direct employees, that Phacil floats between multiple active contracts, many times in the same week and even in the same day. These employees allow the company to temporarily bridge the gaps left by positions they cannot hire staff for, appear to be resolving ongoing system issues, or in some cases, flush out employees that they deem incapable of falling in line with management. These 'experts' are, with management encouragement, combative and accusatory with on-site staff, will directly engage the customer and disparage their own coworkers, and will be moved to other contracts once their technical deficiencies are exposed. One such team of experts involved no less than 10 different individuals (who showed up to a jeans/tshirt work site in suits and ties) who were brought on site overnight, for a 3 week stint. During this time they spent over 1 week trying to explain to the customer the terminology used to describe SAN storage (allocated, available, free space) and arguing with SAN staff about their new definitions of words instead of focusing on anything related to technology. They also spent consecutive days aggressively challenging the on-site staff on all of their technical decisions, ongoing projects, and general IT knowledge. After their engagement, none of these employees has been brought back to the site, there were no known changes to the storage or network systems, and both SAN engineers were soon removed from the contract shortly after. > Department managers verbally require staff to charge no more than 40hrs for any work performed, and then continue to work as necessary. When staff charge beyond 40hrs (acknowledging that they will still only be paid for 40 hours), they are confronted that they are "salaried employees" and need to charge up to and no more than 40. When staff run out of hours and bring this to the attention of management, they are again confronted that they are "salary employees" and must continue to work on projects. In short, due to staffing levels, most staff work beyond 40hrs, but Phacil verbally tells them they are expected to not bill or record this work, which is highly illegal in government contracting. > Accounting/Corporate operate on “accounting cycles” that are apparently pulled from a hat. Pay periods for time charging require signing and approval of time sheets in the middle of work weeks and/or pay periods, arbitrary times in the middle of a month, and other paperwork problems. Staff are bombarded with emails reminding them of when and how to charge time, which is continuously changing, and thus subject to error. It’s actually surprising to go more than two pay periods without a timesheet signing email thread, explaining the latest mid-week double signing of timesheets that needs to occur "otherwise you will likely not be paid". It's simply a headache. > 17 separate emails (group and direct), multiple individual phone calls, and 4 different announcements during group meetings were delivered to discuss/enforce the appropriate Phacil approved email signature and telephone voicemail greeting. Employees were also forced on 2 occasions to respond to a corporate HR staff member to validate they had appropriate mail signatures in their replies. On multiple occasions, different employees were confronted about their email signatures from mobile phone emails when responding to after-hours systems issues, in the midst of ongoing troubleshooting. > 14 weeks in a row 1 or more employees were forcibly terminated from their roles (some with more than a decade of service to the government customer through multiple contract transitions). On one occasion, a respected department manager was paraded around to all the staff to say goodbye, in tears, in an awkward and disrespectful display from the company, who chose to terminate someone in the middle of a work week, in the middle of the afternoon, and did not announce before or after why this was occurring. > Multiple staff that were forcibly terminated, some whom had potential litigation issues against the company, have been given severance deals in exchange for silence, and are only allowed to tell coworkers that they received a severance. > 3 of the 4 incumbent Network Engineers (2 Sr, 1 Mid) voluntarily left the company and contract, all with a year or more of prior service to the customer. One of the back-fill mid engineers also voluntarily left within the first few months. Recently we executed an annual disaster drill, which suffered massive Network related complications simply due to the lack of basic networking skills and experience with the exercise. > A new F5 Engineer voluntarily left within the first few months of her employment, prior to being tasked with anything of significance. > The only incumbent SAN Engineer was terminated for no advertised or obvious reasons prior to being able to transition any information, including system accounts, to the sub-contracting secondary engineer. This secondary engineer was then left to operate for 15 weeks without system access before failing to be successfully cleared by the customer, leaving no storage engineers. > Employees are forced on a weekly and monthly basis to charge hours to project codes that work was not performed for and/or for projects that are not active, for reasons unknown. Employees that do not charge hours as requested will not have their time sheets approved and/or rejected. Enforcement of these illegal charging practices is delegated to project managers, who enforce this only verbally. > All staff are required to send a bi-weekly report to their direct manager as well as the Program Manager. These reports should include a list of tasks/achievements, a list of any feedback from the customer (if applicable), and a comments/questions section. These reports are consistently completely ignored and not responded to, and employees are immediately harassed by management if the reports are not filed. Bi-weekly reports are in addition to the weekly reports that this particular customer requires, and nothing of substance comes from these tasks. > Both Phacil and the customer have stated telework policies. Phacil also requested that staff submit an official form to request a telework schedule. These requests have been ignored for multiple staff members. Telework is frowned upon from a corporate culture standpoint, and the Program Manager also continuously stated that he was "not a fan" of allowing telework in his introductory all-hands meeting. > A project manager (less than 6 months with the company), a Unix engineer (over a decade of work with the customer through multiple contractors), a contract administration employee (over a decade of work with the customer through multiple contractors), and a former acting Program Manager (formerly Sr. Prog Mgr for over 20 contracts with over 11 years of service to Phacil), all women, were systematically harassed and pushed from the company. Two were involuntarily terminated. There is a top-down culture of inappropriate and disrespectful treatment of women in the workplace, regardless of tenure or level. Women are also callously referred to in meetings and phone calls behind their backs. > In an attempt to mitigate staff turnover, HR sponsored an anonymous survey to staff. Due to the size of the contract and the small volume of responses, these results were less than anonymous. There was zero discussion of specific claims of inappropriate and illegal activity that were reported by multiple staff members, and no changes to the work environment came from the survey results.