Great Ideas, Great People, Too much red tape - Engineer Anittel Employee Review

Exposure to different technologies, great for building your experience, flexible work culture, great colleagues (initially)

- Too many middle management sitting down and not really contributing much in the first few years of the merger. - After the merger, customer service simply went down the drain hole. - Corruption in management. In particular in my branch the regional manager in charge allowed bullying to happen, not replacing roles when staff has left and instead increasing the pays to favourable staff colleagues in excess of 40%, sacking a long time staff member while on maternity leave, covering up the failures but then charging the customers for the remediation work, making outright lies about ex-employees to cover up their own failures, deliberately charging customers for basic work that should have been covered by the agreement.

Anittel had a strong lineup of products and services acquired for the most part by the merger festival circa 2010. With that came the staff, good and bad. After a long period of "right sizing" the field staff were left with mostly great, talented people who knew their jobs. Regional offices essentially ran themselves and focused on what they were good at. A great place to build your tech skills if you were happy to find the work you wanted to do and get assigned to it or wanted to succeed as a self-motivated sales person.

Anittel was a bureaucrats wet dream. Policy and procedure out the wazoo and an inversely proportionate level of direction and strategy. With the "right sizing" above many strong leaders who either spoke out or became frustrated "sought other challenges". Getting money or even permission to do anything to build business beyond what can be done for free was impossible. This meant that there was a disconnect in focus by individuals on how to build the business and no national focus. Think of putting 18 hardcore cross-fitters in a round life raft, each with a paddle and nobody spoke the same language but all wanted to return to their home country. In terms of compensation, field staff did ok. Sales staff base was decent too but were saddled with a commissions framework that grew ever stricter and more difficult to realise, especially given the aversion to have a national business building direction.