Pacific Gas and Electric Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric as a contractor for more than a year

Pros – Great work culture. Good exposure to new technologies. Good pay.

Cons – It take long to move any thing because of the hierarchical setup.

Advice to Senior Management – Screen the talent well before recruiting even when its a contract position.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Embraces diversity
Offers competitive pay and very good benefits
Embraces new technology
Doing all they can to ensure public and employee safety
Lots of very sharp and nice people
Excellent education and training opportunities
Corp offices in very central location with lots of transportation options

Cons – Need a little patience to get used to the culture
May need to move to other group if personality types not suited to yours

Advice to Senior Management – Thanks for doing a great job keep employees and the public informed of important information and for dealing very professionally with unprofessonal or downright incorrect media reports.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Plenty of opportunities to change the current processes
Recognition for good work (if you make sure people know you're doing good work) through extra bonuses in your paycheck and fast promotion process
Some flexibility in the creativeness of your design (there's still an opportunity to improve here, but it is getting better every day)
Employee Engagement initiative is attempting to get employee's concerns heard to the upper management
Training opportunities are easily and painlessly approved (within reason of course!) Training budget is often underutilized.
Often get to go to events such as Oracle Open World
Many opportunities to exercise leadership skills even if you're not a supervisor (build lead on projects, etc)
Senior and Middle Management is approachable
Great location, right next to BART!

Cons – Very thin line between operations and development in my specific area. Programmers are on-call 24x7 whereas Operations only works from 8 AM to 8 PM and is not expected to recover jobs without the programmer's intervention (even for a simple failed file transfer due to network issues.) If it's a known issue and the recovery is documented, why get the programmer involved when he/she has a deadline on a project to meet?

Programmers who work on projects are then expected to maintain those programs after they go live instead of transitioning them to the support group as most IT shops do. Other parts of the IT organization have this balanced well but there is an opportunity to fix this issue for our specific reporting group.

Programmers tend to focus on their one area and refuse to let others learn their area as well. I think this is a holdover from the old culture before our most current re-org. It will remain a problem until people stop getting rewarded for knowing one, and only one, system.

Advice to Senior Management – Work to remove the blurred lines between developers and operations. Leverage best practices that have been set by the industry and other IT organizations within the company to achieve this goal.

The attempts to make our company's processes simpler are working. Keep at it! There's still a lot to tackle.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good benefits: 401k matching of 75% for up to 6% of salary; great leadership and career growth opportunities

Cons – bureaucratic. lots of levels of management and slow to make decisions.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Not very aggressive culture at PG&E

Cons – average pay. slow promotions . many lateral moves

Advice to Senior Management – Give employees more autonoly

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric

Pros – competitive compensations
flexible working hours
team-oriented culture

Cons – always in reorganization mode
beaurocracy

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric as an intern for less than a year

Pros – -For an internship, good pay in addition to having decent, various benefits, such as 401k.
-Friendly work environment
-Steady 8-to-5 working hours.

Cons – -Was not given an office access card for a month!
-Work was too easy at times; my supervisor sometimes ran out of legitimate work for me to do.

Advice to Senior Management – -Found it a little difficult to interact with the management since they seemed so busy and occupied with other things. Could have wished to been given more direction. My direct supervisor was very good however at explaining the purpose behind the work I was given.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Excellent Benefits, Ability to advance, Career oriented.

Cons – Very slow moving, tons of bureaucracy, difficult to effect change from the bottom up.

Advice to Senior Management – Excitement and morale building efforts over very high level achievements are not effective for ground level workers. Additionally, quite a few of our efforts are very "one size fits all," including some educational efforts that are overkill for office based employees.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for less than a year

Pros – Employees have a sense of mission, dedication to serving the customer base. The fundamentals of the company are solid and it obtains energy from hydro, coal, gas, and nuclear. Working toward integrating alternative energy sources.

Cons – Regulatory structure inhibits innovation, raises costs, but that is par for the course with regulated companies. Perhaps a bigger problem is that the company is too inbred at least in IT org. IT leadership has changed recently, but it remains to be seen if innovation follows. Change is slow and difficult for many to handle.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep working to integrate outside perspectives and experiences. Congrats on effective dealings with reg bodies.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric as a contractor for more than 3 years

Pros – Lots of opportunity to advance within a large company environment.

Cons – Lots of reorganization, which can be a good thing for some positions. For others, it could mean transition out of the company.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company