Big Brother and the Lack of Trust: A Beacon Funding Story - Anonymous employee Beacon Funding Employee Review

The people that I had the privilege of working for were generally un-trusting and methodical in their review of their employees. Metrics such as keystrokes, computer active time, and vacation time taken were seen as negatives. Meetings were a comical display of cat and mouse to see who can sign in first to get the active hours and keystrokes attributed to their user account. Automated emails, scheduled jobs, and internal phone calls would all help boost your active time. Unfortunately, none of this helped productivity. Near the end of my employment with Beacon Funding, it all became a game. Auto clickers, key stroke generators, and robo-calls to a forwarded cell phone would serve the same purpose as attempting to better the company (in the eyes of management). Reports began to show up centering around active time and keystrokes - which led to meetings about it - which led to terminations. Overtime is encouraged and, potentially swinging this comment to a "Pro", could be be banked to be used as vacation. However, beware of using too much of it for fear of going against the unwritten expectation of 100-200 overtime hours at the end of the year. The more hours worked, the more active time amassed, and the better you look when year-end reviews come around. Now on to the technology. While cutting edge and custom, it is also never changing. This can be seen as a good thing, or a bad thing, but in my experience it seldom worked. The efforts to fix it were often and plenty, and generally could take hours to track down the person that injected one line of code into a functioning product. Source control? Nope. User accounts? Nah. The ability to quickly roll back releases? Kinda? If you want to be a part of the Wild Wild West of putting out fires, the tech stack is for you! And finally the other side of the coin on the business model of financing revenue producing assets. This type of financial services is generally seen as low risk and low investment. Someone wants equipment, searches for it, and applies on their own. These are generally people with a business plan, an idea, and a need for the equipment being financed. Instead, Beacon Funding decided to roll out multiple outbound call centers in various locations across the company. What used to be a low cost, high quality product quickly became a low quality, poorly regulated, and generally distrustful outward appearance. The army of outbound calling agents quickly snowballed into a mass hysteria of keeping people busy, and tracking their performance. In the past, when a system went down, it impacted 10-15 people. Now? 100's of people could be without anything to do while the systems are fixed. This is a key reason to not over complicate and customize your technology stack.