Pros
Nice Van
Good Starting Salary
Modern Offices - Although a bit stuffy
Good Hoilday - 25 Day + BHs.
Some people allowed to work from home, but most are office based.
Able to keep works van at home - you do have to cover the cost of the mileage I believe.
Cons
* Job was advertised as a field engineer, but they didn't tell me that if I had no jobs I would be stuck in an office as a IT call centre operative.
* Limited sick pay (Statutory Only)
* I was a field engineer, but I wasn't given a fuel card or corporate credit card, so I would imagine that I would have to make an expense claim of around £400-£500 per month just in fuel.
* Expected to travel to customers sites in my own time. So I could spend hours traveling to site every day and still expected to be onsite for 9 and not to start traveling back until after 5:30pm.
* The company is in the process of being taken over by Remote Software Solutions. It was confusing who I reported to.
Why I left:
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On Wednesday. I spoke to the person who employed me and raised a few of the issues you'll find above with him. He took it all onboard, shaked my hand and to my mind everything seemed to be getting sorted out.
The very next day, I got asked to come to the office. I thought 'Oh good He's sorted these issues'. I was dragged unexpectedly into a meeting with 4 other people with no warning and was barrage by them over the issues I brought up with yesterday. They said things like 'I had demanded to work from home' (I never did!) and 'Why wasn't I on customer sites at 9am'. I told them that as field engineer with no habitual work address that traveling time to customer sites has to be in works time, not in my personal time (that is in the working time directive after all). All of them basically sat there and got at me for around 10 minutes. One of the individuals even said 'I don't think you are the person we expected you to be'. They told me to hand in my vehicle keys. At this point I was very angry. This was my fifth day on the job, I had completed all my work and I even got a thank you message from one of the customers I went to the day before. I did nothing wrong, but was now being let go. I was so cross at this point that when someone offered me a ride home I refused and walked home.
Now I’ve had a successful career of over 11 years as both a permanent worker and as a IT contractor and have never been treated so poorly as I did that day.
In all fairness I was very upset that this position didn't work out. I was enjoying helping customers onsite, but because of the way I was treated I don't want anything to do with this company.