Where to start... Quick preface: I have been in this role for 3 months with prior experience in other technician roles, but never have I ever been so unprepared, underequipped and overall frustrated with the way a company expects me to carry out my job. It's not just me either, the entire class of techs at my garage before me quit or were fired. There's a revolving door here management doesn't seem to want to talk about, hence the sign on bonus.
1. 2 weeks of PowerPoints and 2 weeks of OTJ training with a tech is extremely insufficient for the amount of systems you will be expected to work on. I would say I have had to learn about 50-60% of the job by "just figuring it out."
2. Your supervisor most likely won't have experience in what you are doing and will tell you to call another technician for advice or call the technician support line which leads me to the next point...
3. Lumen is outsourcing their tech support ops to call centers in India which means the technician can expect to hear thick difficult to understand accents, shoddy call connections resulting in consistent call drops and unnecessarily longer call times (2-3 hours in worst cases).
4. As a tech, you can forget about work life balance. I have worked 50-60hr weeks since I began about 3 months ago. I'm told it gets better but I've seen techs with 5 or 6 months just throw their hands up and walk off the job having been totally fed up with the AI dispatch system assigning them too much work for the day...
5. Lumen is outsourcing as much as they can to AI and application automation which sounds great in theory but is a nightmare to work around in reality. Your job loads change constantly and often overload you with extra work based off of preset timeframes. Many times techs will have 2 or 3 jobs scheduled at the same time which inevitably makes them late to appointments and frustrates the customer. When you call dispatch they basically tell you "too bad." (not exaggerating on that one).
6. The app all technicians are supposed to use is utterly useless. Constantly glitches, crashes or lacks the information needed to complete your job. Because it manages your timecard, you have to keep track of every hour you work because it can, will and has shorted people on their time when it comes to getting paid. Not good!
7. The Union is a double-edged sword but you have to remain a tech for 18 months before switching roles. I.e. I have another 15 months of garbage to sift through before I could be considered for something else with Lumen.
Ultimately, I could probably add 4 or 5 more items to this list regarding the overbearing company culture, ridiculous company policies and some of the unaddressed hazards of the job but overall this has been a very frustrating experience for me. I genuinely enjoy the work itself and it's great seeing a customers face light up when you finally fix their internet but the company is constantly in the way of letting you do your job.
