Cool Co-Workers Horrible Management/Processes - Operations Engineer 1 SwitchThink Solutions Employee Review

I interviewed with the Operations Manager and Director after what was essentially a brief 15-minute conversation consisting of a single question: “Tell us about yourself.” Based on my experience in credit union operations, system conversions, and automation (including OpCon workflow design), I was verbally offered the role the same day. However, the final offer came in $3,000 lower than what had been discussed with the recruiter, reportedly to reduce recruiting costs, which raised early concerns about internal alignment. Training was largely unstructured. Only a couple of tenured team members made meaningful efforts to help with onboarding, while most processes had to be learned independently despite the complexity of the systems involved. After a few months it became clear that many operational processes were heavily manual and had not been revisited for efficiency improvements. For example, disk usage for roughly 80+ hosted client environments was being gathered manually by connecting to each environment individually and recording values in Excel. This process took roughly two hours. I created a PowerShell script that automated the process and reduced the task to a few minutes. While the automation worked effectively, there appeared to be limited appetite for process improvement or automation initiatives. Operational alerting was also centralized in a single shared inbox for dozens of clients. During busy processing periods this created large email backlogs and made prioritization difficult. Suggestions to introduce segmentation and prioritization for time-sensitive items such as ACH processing were not implemented. Similarly, communication with clients during environment upgrades was handled by teams who were not always provided with technical requirements ahead of time. I proposed a simple intake questionnaire template that could be used to align expectations between teams and clients prior to upgrades, but the idea was not adopted. There were also challenges related to testing and deployment practices. Automation scripts were sometimes developed without dedicated test environments, which created operational risk when changes needed to be validated. Overall, the organization appeared resistant to process improvement, automation, and operational modernization. Employees who enjoy optimizing workflows, introducing automation, or improving operational efficiency may find the environment frustrating.