Pros
I was an engineer, and at the end the job wasn’t bad at all for engineers. Sometimes in my earlier days there it felt like the only way that things got better were when somebody quit, but since that happened fairly often the place was in a state of constant improvement. They replaced the ops management chain which lead to a lot of positive changes. When I left it felt like they were finally close to being staffed after a years-long period of under-staffing due to high turnover. Things were much better with a lot more hands steering the ship. It’s been a pretty long time since I saw someone storm out and quit. It used to be so bad that one time when we needed new pictures because a lot of people on the site no longer worked there, we had to bring in employees from another sister company in the building to make the office look more populated. It’s definitely a step-up from retail, although the uniform is still blue shirt, khakis, and a lanyard. You’ll learn a lot no matter what level you come in at, and your coworkers are great if not pretty stressed out. When you’re in the office, you’re basically allowed to wear whatever you want unless a client is coming in. Every once in a while a manager threatens to take that away from everyone because of something like someone didn’t wear dress pants to work in a factory that day, but generally it’s pretty laissez-faire. Depending on team and scheduling, you can get out of the office a decent amount and go to client sites. Having a car will help with this, and also give you an optional place to go scream when the pressure gets too high. Make sure you get there earlier than about 8:30 AM on most days or it becomes exceedingly difficult to get a parking spot within several blocks. After we got engineer on-call coverage, the engineering role became a lot more reasonable. Before, it wreaked havoc on every aspect of my life. It’s difficult to explain just how unreasonable it was, and was extremely undersold in the interview process. In college, I joined a fraternity that had a “hell week” where they’d wake you up at all hours yelling frantically at you. It was a lot like that, except it happened every 3rd week, all week, for years and with the implication that if you faltered you’d lose your livelihood. After losing an entire team of the most skilled engineers in the entire company to the insane demands we got an overnight team in India which caused a major slowdown in the hemorrhaging of engineering talent. When coworkers were on-call, it was easy to see the physical and mental toll it took on them, and it wasn’t a job you could reasonably do with a family as it would frequently require you to drive hours away at the drop of a hat at random times of the night. It was particularly frustrating because we were told for years that it was too much money to actually staff people for the night and weekend coverage that clients were already paying a lot extra for. Technician on-call wouldn’t be so bad if it were emergency on-call, but you’ll be woken up at 3 AM to help any of the thousands of your users all over the globe who are all routed exclusively to your cellphone with things like their printer. It might be 1 PM where the caller is so they think nothing of it, and you’ll get in big trouble for missing any calls. Although there were attempts by managers to create them, there’s no actual written policy against missed calls. One guy got out of a write-up for missing calls just by asking HR which rule in the on-call policy he violated. While they refuse to write down a response expectation and as a result HR will throw out write-ups about missed calls, you’ll still get chewed out and it will be held against you as if there were one. You’ll know when your manager is mad at you, too, because you’ll get the tickets that require working with AT&T. I’d like to get into on-call a bit for techs, as this isn’t communicated during the hiring process. You’ll get several-to-dozens of calls just between 5am and 7pm every Saturday and Sunday, and you’ll be told to clock out the minute you stop working on one until the next one comes in. The calls come in scattered, so you’ll have entire weekends wiped out but only be paid for minutes to a few hours. On top of that, since there’s international users you support, the calls don’t stop at night. You’ll be expected to wake up, field the call, clock out immediately, and fall back asleep until the next call comes in. There will be nights where you’re kept up all night but paid less than an hour, and then expected to come in at your regularly scheduled time to finish out the other 7+ hours. People who don’t currently work tech-level primary on-call will tell you that tech-level primary on-call isn’t too bad. It feels like being a crossing guard but you have to clock out between every car. You’ll be told to “live your life” while on call, but unless you can live your life in the tiny increments of time between the tons of random unplanned micro shifts, the rules, unwritten expectations, and call volume will prevent you from using your time for your own purposes. You’re can’t travel too far from the city, you can’t drink, and the response times dictate you must be helping the user or travelling to them within minutes of every single call. While you can’t formally get in trouble for not picking up the phone while driving where it’s illegal or if you’re somewhere without cell phone service, you’ll still hear about it later. It’s in the policy that you have to keep your ringer on max volume at all times, so you can’t go to the movies and you’re that guy whose phone is going off in the middle of events. Ask any technician during primary on-call if they’d feel comfortable even going out to dinner. The on-call guide even cites the movie “Heat” as how you shouldn’t do anything that you’re not willing to walk away from, expecting you to equate the urgency of living a life of crime and being pursued by the police to a customer not seeing all their emails on their iPhone. The people upstairs seem to have a better quality of life and stick around a lot longer. The office is quiet, from what I’ve heard they’re paid better, and if you come up on there on a Friday afternoon it’s a bit of a ghost town so I’d guess they have much more of a flexible work schedule than the majority of people in Ops. The life seems entirely different, and reading a lot of these reviews makes me think most of the overly positive ones come from people upstairs, so if you can land a position up there you’d probably be much happier. The day-to-day in ops is pretty straightforward. There’s a never-ending queue of tickets for a pool of clients and you work on them until you leave for the day. The documentation is pretty thorough and the tools are pretty easy to use and automate a lot of the annoying parts of fixing computers. What you don’t know you Google or failing that, ask someone else or escalate the ticket up to the next level. If you’re just getting started, it’s a very quick way to gain experience with a lot of small business equipment and some enterprise grade setups just depending. If you’re more established in your career, you may find the demands unreasonable for the pay. One time in a review I was praised for spending upwards of 30 hours in a weekend on an emergency with little sleep, and then, in the same breath, told I need to be looking for ways I can go above and beyond as a justification for a mediocre raise. It completely crushed my engagement for the next entire year and caused me to look for a new job when my next review came up as I didn’t want to receive another itemized list of my flaws in lieu of a larger pay bump. From what I’ve heard from coworkers, the best way to get a larger pay raise is to come in with another offer in-hand. The office itself is nice although the downstairs office can be a little difficult to get work done in. It’s an open office design with brick walls and no noise dampening, so once a few people get on the phone and start trying to talk over each other it gets extremely loud, which likely won’t be helped by the higher density of people afforded by replacing all of the desks with smaller ones to fit more people in. I think there’s a construction company that turns into a stomp band at night directly overhead. There’s so much calamity up there that people have nicknamed the bits of ceiling raining down into your coffee cup with every crash “ceiling snow.” People who work upstairs or who can go across the hallway to work will tell you that it’s not too loud down there. Upside of the smaller desks is that they have an upper level you can hide your coffee cup under to avoid the ceiling snow. For that coffee cup, there are options that range from medium roast to dark roast depending on how long the Kirkland coffee was on the warmer. At the end I noticed there were some K-cups for the Keurig. One of the fridges was stocked with beer regularly, providing a bit of an oasis to the otherwise stark offerings of the break room. Then an ex-employee posted a review on here mentioning that fridge and kinda implied we were a bunch of alcoholics. Unfortunately, that caused a huge management crisis and now it stands largely empty, making it far harder to drink at 8 AM on a Tuesday. Otherwise, there’s some condiments in the fridge but it’s never really clear what’s community and what’s owned by somebody unless it has a name on it. There’s generally been a somewhat current gen gaming console or more in the breaking room with enough peripherals for several people to play. The mostly empty break room normally wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but you’ll notice it a lot more when you go to your clients who have really nice break rooms with snacks and drinks. Whenever there’s a new employee, which is pretty often at least, there’s free lunch. Oftentimes enough is ordered for everyone. Sometimes there’s events where the break room gets stocked with food and drinks. We generally weren’t allowed in our break room during those events but we often got to eat the leftover food. There’s a lot of random events where food would be brought in and you’d get a free lunch. The company parties were always really nice and always fun. The HR department is excellent and now have some extra help which has really shown through on recruitment efforts. It’s a dog friendly office. The CEO’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I haven’t found anyone who disagrees. The checks always cashed on time.
Cons
Most of the downsides of working there from my perspective had to do with the company being a bit aggressively frugal. They don’t spend a lot on the employee experience, and while they’re under no obligation to give us nice accommodations there were several things that made me uncomfortable and think there was perhaps implicit permission to work off the clock or other gray areas, for example: • There’s a rule that states they don’t have to pay you for time you worked if something goes wrong and you make the problem worse. • Employees were pressured to come in and paint the office off-the-clock as “volunteers.” • There was a committee dedicated to improving the employee experience and planning official company events but members were told they wouldn’t be paid for it and it was “voluntary” only after several meetings had already occurred. The committee was effectively disbanded when nobody wanted to work for free. • There was a rule that stated we must (in bold, underline, all caps) check our email every morning, every night, and periodically throughout the day when we were on call and in practice you were held accountable to checking the email chains at odd hours on your off days, but when people realized they could bill time for that work the rule quietly went away. I was personally questioned about why I was billing for that time spent working, but was still paid for it. • There’s a poster in the break room that says you have to have at least 24 hours of uninterrupted rest in a 7 day week. One coworker, after mandatorily working 12 days in a row, went into the break room and highlighted that part of the poster. He quit shortly after but I always kinda viewed him as a bit of a hero.
