Extremely high workload which is not shared evenly between staff. Some first liners will be answering 50+ calls per day, resolving 25+ of these as first time fixes, where as others will be answering half the amount of calls per day and either not hitting the absurdly high quota or will be spending all of their time watching the job queue picking out password resets to up their stats to make it look as if they have worked equally as hard. You can answer over 50 calls before the end of the day, have more than twice the amount of calls as the person behind you in 2nd place and yet still receive an email from management telling you how YOU are not doing as well as others on the phone stats because you have spent far too long between the 25 extra calls that you have taken to update the call tickets explaining what you have done to fix the issues, or to explain what has been done and what needs to be looked at by 2nd line - Calls that you have missed and have then been passed onto other ( lesser performing staff ) are far more important for you to answer than for knowledge to be passed on and made readily available on your tickets.
Management don't listen to their staff, it is their way, or nothing. if you have a suggestion, it will go unheard, until weeks or months down the line when a member of management miraculously comes up with the idea themselves.
Management do not have IT experience themselves, so when they question you about how to fix an issue, explaining how time consuming certain steps are, you are told you are doing it wrong and their must be a faster or "smarter way" but don't provide that information to you, instead you are told that you are expected to know this.
Staff who have worked their the longest have a good relationship with management and use this to their benefit, if they don't like a call that has been pushed through to them they can get management to push the call back out to someone else, further increasing some peoples work load whilst reducing others.
Most staff are rude and obnoxious, if you ask for help you'll be told to just use Google to find all your answers rather than sit down and go through something that they know and would easily be able to teach to you.
Lack of training. You are expected to work on software that you have never seen before and get all fixes done within 15 minutes. If you don't get the fix done within 15 minutes then you are told to pass it on to the 2nd line support team to solve the issue, you will either never see or hear from this call again because its fixed by the 2nd line or the call will come straight back into your queue again for you to try and find any tiny bit of time in your day to come back to it. Again, as 2nd line are members of staff who have been their the longest, they are backed by management with every decision as they are what can only be described as "best of friends"
Interviews promise great things. You'll learn so much on the desk and progress into 2nd line can be done in months if you are willing to learn and work hard.... until you get the job and are then told that you have to have a minimum of 12 months on the desk at first line before you can moved into 2nd line...unless of course you interviewed for 2nd line from the start and then you can take a 2nd line job straight away.... 1st liners are told that they do not know enough about the companies they support to be 2nd line even if they have 6 months experience, but this experience doesn't matter if you are applying externally.
Managements favorite saying is "Work smarter, not harder" to which their explanation is "when you are on the phone, you should be using this time to solve the customers issue, you should also be updating previous tickets and looking at tickets currently in the queue that you can work on without having to be on the phone to that customer" which seems to me you are adding EXTRA work to yourself and working harder, not smarter... Working smarter would be to ensure that issues do not arise and that they work proactively not re-actively.
