Not a great career opportunity - Lead Systems Engineer Lumen Employee Review

1.0
21 Apr 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Diverse environment - there's everything from high-end cloud to ancient Solaris and WS2003 boxes. If you ever wanted to learn the breadth of IT, this is a good place. Benefits - The Health Care and 401k are decent, the STI is generally reliable. Work/Life Balance - The PTO is pretty fair. I was almost never denied a day off.

Cons

Pay - New corporate philosophy is not to give employees raises or COLA. Employees had bonuses and raises taken, then were told they were going to readjust for raises quarterly (they lied, this never happened) then intentionally pushed every manager to flatten their stack to avoid raises. But hey, lots of EBITDA! The management stack on the CTL Business side is downright ghoulish with how disconnected they are from workers. Your frontline manager may or may not care, but it's almost certain that you will very rarely communicate with director, and never communicate with your VP, unless it's them talking to you in a Zoom Meeting. This company unequivocably does not care about their employees. They RIFfed hundreds of employees to India, and then had a tone-deaf Hawaiian Shirt Day. They have a tendency to do this - take all the bonuses, but then buy some cupcakes or somesuch. They've changed operational paradigms on employees repeatedly, moving Systems Engineers to DevOps without any sort of training or expectation, pushing employees into Project Management without any sort of understanding or training. These employees will generally get hammered by management for not performing a role they weren't hired or trained for. Corporate culture is a mess and nepotism and favoritism is rampant. Certain managers are notorious for padding their teams with incompetent employees who were somebody's sexual partner or buddies who rode motorcycles or other complete BS. Pushing back against this nonsense tends to get you branded a malcontent. They're also incredibly, stupidly greedy - promoting employees from lower teams at lower pay rates and refusing to readjust them to equivalency with the direct hires until those people leave. This culture has so broken the hiring process that many teams have had to hiring in overpaid contractors. The only teams that can fill are entry-level, so anybody entry-level with even a slight spark of talent gets poached up to the middle teams, even though they're unqualified, which drags down the middle teams and the entry-level equally.

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Lumen Response
6y
Thank you for taking the time to write a review. We have made several organizational and philosophical changes through our integration with Level 3 and our business transformation journey. We work hard to create an inclusive work environment built on the foundation of strong leadership and are sorry to hear your experience with us was not in alignment with our standards and expectations.

Explore other reviews about Lumen

5.0
24 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Easy to learn, manageable schedule, supportive management

Cons

Changes in systems with many malfunctions, confusing workflows, policies set with little guidance (like figure it out yourself)

4.0
24 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good pay, great benefits, great people to work with, boss is great, etc.

Cons

Company is undergoing transformation, so it's a bit chaotic. Have to work with old stuff and new stuff at the same time. Hopefully that will change as we transform further.

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