Ultratec Reviews

If you are a budding IT professional in any sort of infrastructure role (systems administration, systems engineering, desktop support, information security, network engineering, etc.), I cannot stress this enough: steer clear of this company. The following are some examples of the cluster you'll be walking into: - Underqualified, incompetent IT management - Lack of proper documentation (tribal knowledge is the norm) - Outdated tech stack - Gatekeeping of knowledge - Major system misconfigurations - Zero ownership of systems or applications - Lack of support or acknowledgement from management ..While there are many more issues I could list, I believe the point has been made: you will take one step forward and three steps backward in regards to your IT career should you choose to work here. ---------- Organization Cons: Pay - While I was paid fairly for my role, it seems that's only the case if you're valued. Some of my colleagues were paid abysmally for their job title and subsequent responsibilities. 401k - The retirement plan is basically non-existent. My recommendation is to simply max out a Roth IRA in lieu of using their retirement plan. Advancement - I asked countless times for a career growth plan. After many years, no plan has been created, nor have I received acknowledgement that a plan is underway. Culture - Overall, the company culture is the definition of a Good Ol' Boys Club. It sucks. Micromanagement - It's bad. If your working hours are 6AM to 3PM, clocking in at 6:02AM will earn you a lecture, even if you're working as a salaried employee. Your supervisor will randomly call you out of the blue multiple times per day to, "check in," which is a nice way of saying they don't trust you to do your work. On the flip side, clocking out at 5PM after doing two hours of extra work will be ignored entirely, with no good will or benefits coming from putting in extra time. Discouragement of Social Interaction - I have never, in my life, worked at a place that seems to disapprove of building good interpersonal relationships with your coworkers. I have seen so many verbal warnings for socializing (meaning there are plenty of written warnings I'm simply not aware of) I've lost count over the years. I would like to note, however, that it seems exceptionally worse as of late. Work Environment - While Ultratec currently possesses a hybrid work model, IT management will go out of their way to make you feel like you should be in the office the full five days each week. From constant check-ins, insinuations of "unavailability," throwing around standard corporate buzzwords like "collaboration" and "teamwork," it is extremely evident that the organization is run by an older generation of managers who don't believe you're actually working unless they can look over your shoulder every thirty minutes to confirm it. When you do go into the office, the building itself hasn't been renovated with any major improvements or modern amenities, and feels like an old government building from the late 80s or 90s. Sitting under buzzing fluorescent lights for 9 hours, getting up every hour or so to use the restroom, along with very few verbal exchanges between coworkers, is not my understanding of "collaboration" or "teamwork." PTO - Abysmal. You start with 15 days of PTO per year, with your first increase being after FIVE years of employment. There is no negotiating more PTO in the hiring process. It's the worst PTO package I've had through an employer compared to any of my previous employers. Layoffs - Ultratec focuses on audio captioning technologies for the hearing impaired. As such, they employ many captioning assistants (CA's) at one of their many large call centers. Within the past year or so, hundreds upon hundreds of people have been laid off as they are migrating to the cloud for AI automated captioning. While I understand technology renders certain things less efficient or somewhat obsolete, people that have worked for this company for many years are being told they'll be out of a job with no relocation efforts within the company. This is nothing short of disheartening to see from a self-proclaimed "mom and pop" style of company that supposedly prides itself on caring about its employees. Training - Non-existent. If you want training in something actually pertinent to your job, the answer will be a hard no. In addition, I was forcefully signed up for various trainings that had nothing to do with my career progression path or interests, and the worst part? It was done without my consent. ---------- IT-specific Cons If you are a remotely competent IT professional, you will quickly recognize a variety of major issues that exist within the Ultratec IT environment. As part of being a responsible employee, it should be your duty to alert IT management to these issues, as I did many, many times. Unfortunately, anytime I brought attention to a potential issue, whether it was a misconfiguration, old piece of software, potential vulnerability, etc., I was given one of the following responses: 1. It's not that big of a deal. 2. You're wrong. 3. We're in the process of fixing it (even if they've been "fixing it" for months or years). 4. You don't know what you're talking about. 5. It's been this way forever and we've never had an issue, why change it? 6. You should focus on other things. In short, IT management will ignore you at best or gaslight you at worst. If you attempt to provide any suggestions or feedback that could be considered critical/negative, you'll be shot down, especially if those suggestions didn't originally stem from the minds of IT management. ---------- Ultratec doesn't create executive positions for their IT management, such as CIO, CTO, etc. Generalized titles such as Vice President or Assistant Vice President, Director, etc., are utilized in their place. Going forward, I will simply refer to IT management as a group, as I am unable to refer to executives by job title. As a general rule of thumb, IT management will lie to you, talk down to you, placate you, make promises they never intend to deliver on, argue with you on what you need resource-wise to fulfill your established job duties, and generally make your job a miserable experience. Furthermore, these individuals do not possess a proper IT background; no degree, no certifications, no job experience to provide technical proficiency or familiarity, etc. You read correctly - the people in the top levels of IT are "IT professionals" who have never taken a single help desk call. What this means, unfortunately, is that a certain level of blind faith is put into lower IT management, because they don't possess any relevant experience to draw from in order to know if those in lower IT management are making proper decisions. To make matters worse, IT management is filled with, bar none, some of the most incompetent people I've ever had the misfortune of working with. One of the managers is a complete narcissist with very little understanding of technology solutions as a whole, and will regularly argue with seasoned IT staff members with nothing but Google research. Extremely unprofessional behavior seems to be the norm: inability to be wrong in any capacity, utter disregard for any negative feedback or legitimate concerns, terrible attitudes towards subordinates, condescending/rude verbal remarks, intense micromanagement, decision-making that goes directly against industry best practice, lack of understanding of basic IT concepts, etc. While some of these can be excused or ignored to some degree as long as you have thick skin, the lack of industry knowledge, experience, certifications, etc., leads to extremely poor decisions (making major changes to the production environment in the middle of the day, etc.) Despite this being brought to the attention of upper IT management, nothing has changed. To summarize: IT management is plagued with unqualified individuals who constantly think they know better than you, no matter how much experience you possess. One of the most telling examples of current IT management is when they were proven wrong with empirical evidence on two separate third-party assessments; assessments that were performed by numerous, highly-certified people with 10-15+ years in their various IT disciplines. They ignored any findings or results that disagreed with their preconceived notions and cherry-picked the results to the point of rendering the assessments useless, resulting in a waste of tens of thousands of dollars. This was AGAIN brought to the attention of upper IT management, who did absolutely nothing about it. To compound a strained department further, the overall feel of the IT department has become extremely tedious and micromanaged, with IT management constantly checking up on you and looking over your shoulder. IT management has decided to force Agile project management on to every single staff member, resulting in ludicrous changes across the board. The sheer level of meetings held to "discuss initiatives" and "check up" on people as opposed to actually taking concrete steps to get things done makes projects and initiatives take ten times longer than they should. All employees track and provide updates on their projects in a central database that's visible to all team members in the first place, making additional meetings or discussions an enormous time sink. Each week is filled with hours upon hours of additional meetings that have no tangible benefit to anyone who attends them. Agile is not a framework that works for anything outside of software development. The sad part? The whole project management initiative originates from the fact that IT management simply doesn't trust the people they actively CHOSE to hire.