Pros
- Great co-workers Just great people, not too much else to say here. - Pretty relaxed about time off requests I have hardly ever had a time off request denied. - Usually flexible about schedules As long as you are kind to the managers and they can find someone cover the shifts they need done they are quite easy going about schedules - Yearly pay raise depending on a review process
Cons
-The review process is broken You are graded on a 1 - 5 system in several different categories, anything below a 3 means you get no raise that year. 3 means you are doing "good", 4 "great", 5 "excellent". The HR manager put it in these terms, 3 = B, 4 = A, 5 = A+. As a employer in a college town this tells you something, since A+ doesn't exist in college, it is unobtainable in their review process. They will nit and pick at anything they can think of to ensure you don't get anything higher than a 3. A single mistake in a year, even a minor one like "not being flexible with your schedule" can put you at a 2 and deny you your raise. - Minor to no rewards for going the extra 100 miles, no punishment for doing the bare minimum (or even less if you are sneaky about it). You can work hard every day, you can do better than all of your peers in all of their measurements that they attempt to provide weekly, you can get complements from client after client and not even receive a thank you much less an employee of the month award or a "playmaker" of the month, which was added recently to help people feel more rewarded like an employee of the month without actually having to give any rewards other than a mention in an e-mail that gets blasted out to all of the employees and promptly deleted by most of them without looking at it. On the other hand you can do the bare minimum required to get your numbers high enough to not get talked to and then watch youtube, hulu, netflix, play around on facebook, chat with friends, have friends come hang out with you (depending on your shift and who shares that shift with you), or take a nap. As long as you do the bare minimum, you will get your yearly raise and not get any flack from team leads/management. - Management doesn't listen. Management pretends they care because they have been instructed to. Some do it pretty well, others you can see right through their words. Often I have been told to not ask questions and to stop trying to suggest a change in the way we do things. In the end, unless it saves the company a boatload of money they do not care. They don't care if it will improve the client's experience, they don't care if it will reduce stress and work load across departments, they just don't care unless it hurts their bottom line. For example there is currently a migration between datacenters going on, the reason? Save the company money! That is fine and dandy but when it takes down clients sites because they are rushing to get things out of the old datacenter to save themselves some money, they push teams harder, making extra time mandatory instead of offering incentives to those who would stay extra time if management would simply offer some sort of incentive. - Management is closed to new ideas. There is an excel spreadsheet on one of our servers for employees to put suggestions if they have any. For the first little while this spreadsheet appears to have been used quite a bit by numerous employees. Now it lays dormant. The reason is because all of the ideas in there are ignored. Things that are years and years old that would make things easier on clients are just sitting there, looked at by nobody. When bringing new ideas to management employees are usually asked to be put in that spreadsheet to rot. Nobody has put things in there for years because everybody knows that things put in there will never be done. Often new ideas are put in that spredsheet because they are "too new" and "haven't been tested" when in-fact most of the industry has moved to that new OS / software / tool / infrastructure. - Management doesn't know how to handle situation between peers. Occasionally there will be a disagreement between peers, it is going to happen. The management has instructed the employees that if there is a problem between peers, that they should be involved. When you introduce management to the problem, they play it down, say it is not a problem and they will resolve it. Not only do they not resolve it, they typically make it worse by misunderstanding the complaint or by lying to the other party involved. It is much better to simply contact the party you are having trouble with and work it out. Involving HR basically guarantees that you (the person filing the complaint) will not receive a raise that year.
