Pros
Internal team at local office are friendly and try to help each other Office is modern, well lit with plenty of space with small kitchen for Tea/coffee, fridge and microwave.
Cons
Since being acquired I have seen it slowly drop with importance more seeming to focus on short term profits over long term: Extremely poor Comms - sent to jobs with no context of work that has been done/needs doing, job requirements poorly told to engineer leading to situation of not 100% knowing what requirements need to be met vs what the customer has been told will be done. Poor Planning - Common to have jobs left to last minute or squeezed in with extremely tight time restrictions to even complete the job if everything goes right. Meaning jobs often "overrun" due to time assigned being too tight creating domino effect of causing follow up job to overrun which then runs over as well. Then when you do have a quiet day and get told there is nothing to be assigned and to just help around, it is then followed up a few days later with urgent jobs that all need finishing that day and when you look at the system you see they are old enough jobs that they could have been assigned on those quiet days preventing them from becoming urgent. Poor Resource Management – Employees often have too many tasks assigned resulting in experienced engineers being difficult to reach due to being busy, also makes it difficult to learn off others as they are more focused on finishing as much of what they have been assigned as possible. Results in cut corners to even be possible to meet expectations. Common to never be able to focus on one task at a time, you will have multiple managers all pulling you to work on their job resulting in you constantly being on and off the same job and losing track of what needs to be done. Extreme Focus on KPIs – You will not be judged by quality/efficiency as KPIs punish this. Finish a 6 hour job in 3 hours, you are missing 3 hours on time sheet which the system will flag unless you can quickly find something to fill the gap with. Focus on one large multi day job, the system will flag not meeting weekly closure KPI. Spend 4 hours doing a 3 hour job as something went wrong or you wasted time due to poor planning / poor comms by company, it will be flagged in KPI. Several KPI are also unrealistic, e.g. 100% KPI on closed within time budget, so 1 job going wrong will cause a failure. Time not Respected – Have had clients be told I will be onsite at 7:30am before I am told. Then when reminded that is both before my start time as well as the client is 2-3 hours drive away I am treated as “don’t want to do my job”. Kept until close to finish time on site several hours away from office. Overtime pay had to be argued for with expectation when I started that this extra time was unpaid. Focus on taking not Giving / Lack of Trust – All expenses need to be pre-approved by management so they can check its cheapest (e.g. mileage for driving to assigned job needs pre-approval so they can check public transport could be cheaper, took me 3 months to get a replacement screwdriver after mine broke as couldn’t get expense approved), when assigned to jobs that are distance away from home/office with tasks that even when working through lunch are a push to complete in time there are no perks to reward it (e.g. no food paid for, drinks for job at an empty building in a poor location not provided). When company has problem it is urgent but when employees have an issue it tends to be ignored with staff told it will be looked into but nothing ever happening.
