Getting Worse Every Year - L1 Support Engineer Instructure Employee Review

The raises are typically based on your ability to brown-nose, and some arbitrary statistics that give the supervisors a false impression of who the best agents are. The less breaks you take the better, I was highly praised and rewarded the year that I only took a 15 minute break all day. The supervisors micromanage your every action and word and will let you know every time that you make a mistake or could do better. It used to be every year supervisors would move on, but now the same supervisors love being the lazy bosses and enforcing rules. It is sad they some of the laziest agents became supervisors that were notorious for finding ways not to work. They get promoted to supervisors and now love telling everyone what amazing agents they were. It takes a special kind of person to get rewarded so much for doing so little. You can work your butt off and not get promoted at Instructure unless you have experience being a McDonald's supervisor. That holds its weight in gold! The equipment they give you is great, but it's too bad that they don't upgrade your equipment after 3 years like they used to. It really stinks not having stock options like we used to when we were public. There is no bonuses or extra compensation for working hard other than getting a 5% raise instead of a 4% raise. As an L1 agent you have to prepare to take the blame for anything wrong with the users computer, their school, their teacher, Canvas bugs, how busy our hotline is, lack of features, their slow internet, etc. There is usually nobody else available 24/7 so we get complained to about everything. Since Canvas is open source, this usually consists of people calling to complain about the Zoom, or McGraw-Hill, or Google integration not working. The people that work here don't typically have much going on in their lives. Maybe a cat or dog, and occasionally a significant other. It's hard to compete with that if those people work overtime. Don't expect too much from your co-workers unless you play video games all day. They are good people, but not your typical Utah crowd. There really is nothing fun about this job anymore. We used to have lunches, parties, meetings, one-on-ones with supervisors, contests, pizza dinners regularly, watch the Jazz game as we send emails, but there is pretty much none of that now. We have new leadership that is only focused on the bottomline and that's it. You're fired if you don't meet the minimum number of cases. Don't expect any special treatment or seniority for working hard and staying with the company for 5 years. The veteran agents that are extremely experienced, knowledgeable and efficient get paid pretty much the same as beginner agents that are slow and don't know what they're doing yet. Sorry to say it, but communicating and dealing with the schools from Australia are the worst. They are hard to understand, very demanding, impatient, and they call things by different names. It's a bad experience 80% of the time. 2020 has been horrible for support. Usually things are busy 50% of the year and calm for 50%. We have pretty much had a stream a callers all year long. Sometimes they are on hold for over 3 hours by the time they talk to you. At that point, if you can't help them they are furious. What I wouldn't give for 2 minutes between calls to take notes and a breath. Definitely no mention of bonuses for all of the hard work. It's hard to be cheery and put my best foot forward when almost all of the perks of this job have been changed or taken away. The company can and will change their policies and they don't really care how it will affect the people that have helped build this company. I could see Instructure telling of the Full-time employees that they are now 30 PT employees so that they don't have to pay for benefits. There is a severe deficiency in training and expectations. You are pretty much expected to learn Canvas on the fly while you put people on hold. The training is getting a little better, but that's not a high bar. Expect to feel extremely small when demanding people call in about something that you have never heard of, but are supposed to be an expert in. Burnout is very real at this job. It might be better than some call centers, but that isn't saying much. Canvas knows they are one of the few companies hiring right now and they are milking it for all it's worth. Low wages, high expectations, because people have nowhere else to go. Canvas Support demands MANDATORY overtime with no time-off for about 6 months of the year. Don't plan on getting sick or having any sort of emergency during that time or you will have to make up the time on the weekend or holiday. The PTO system is a hot mess that changes every year. My anxiety from the job is off the charts. It's hard to know how much longer I can last before I go the way that all of my friends have that worked here. The feelings in this review have been shared by many that have now left the company. It's sad to see the lack of effort to make our lives any easier. L1s are the scapegoat, because of the lack of empathy from management. My rant is over, but I hope that this has helped someone and informed their decision.