They tried to buy my silence. They failed.
Pros
Wage is pretty good, as are the benefits. The user base is pretty good, very few are high maintenance and everyone is pretty welcoming. I got a reimbursed trip to Montreal to train, which was a mostly positive experience.
Cons
The downsides of working in this place start and end with the immediate bosses as well as the bosses higher up the chain. A lot of the escalation teams are very frustrating to work with. They will constantly boomerang tickets back to you with no notes on them or ask you to do something you've already done. And yet what have the managers done about this? Nothing. Once a member of the server escalation team sent a ticket back to me asking me to do something that per the screenshot he posted, the option was greyed out. I've never encountered escalation teams that were this frustrating and annoying to work with. And yet what did the manager do about it? Absolutely nothing. The level 2 team wouldn't even replace the nonfunctional printer I had recycled and just closed 3 tickets requesting that without explanation. I later found out it was because they were in the process of switching brands of printers. Why they couldn't just tell me that in the first place I have no idea. Complete and total disrespect. Meanwhile I kept getting asked every once in awhile when the printer was being replaced and I had no idea because I was being railroaded as much as my people were. When there is a legitimate reason for tickets to come back to you that's fine, I can accept that, but I can't live with tickets being closed without explanation or tickets being sent back to me without reason. The Apps and Network teams are the only 2 teams that don't seem to do this to the frontline IT team, every other team is terrible for this. And then came the pet project of the "individuals" two and three levels up - ITIL training. This training was foisted on everyone as a way to increase skills but is training largely concentrated around project management and thus is largely irrelevant to the frontline IT team. But try telling that to the bosses - when I filled out a survey telling them that, they freaked out and censored my feedback from IT town halls, then sicked my immediate boss on me who denied that the training was mandatory despite the fact that the phrase "certification is mandatory" was in the email notifying everyone about the training. Talk about a mixed message. When I pointed this out to him after the conversation, I received no response back. This started a dictatorial and allegedly targeting scheme against me by the bosses. This training took away half our working day for a week, which had the predictable effect of quintupling our unassigned ticket queue from 50 to 250 tickets. It took us a month just to catch up on them, a wound self inflicted by the bosses multiple levels up. I seemed to be branded a villian after this, which created a very toxic work environment. Here's how much of a "villian" I was, though - once I had time in the day I took all the training on the company training website, so clearly I wasn't opposed to take training to become a better employee, it was just this particular training I didn't want. But of course this distinction was lost on the bosses. Which then brings me to my last day. My admin account was disabled without telling me why, then after I left to deal with something and came back I was told I had been let go without giving me a reason why except "performance issues." I asked the HR guy if he knew what the boss was talking about because this was the first I'd heard of any performance issues, he said the boss never got back to him with this information either so he didn't know what the performance issues were. If I had to guess I'd say I was let go because I dared to give honest feedback about a pet project of the bosses that tied up the entire team for the next month, that there actually were no performance issues, but of course it will forever remain a mystery because I was never actually told. Why would you treat your people like this? Just toss them out into the street without even looking them in the eye and telling them why? The only reason they're not being sued for wrongful termination is because they tossed me out on the street during my probationary period. Absolutely horrible way to treat your people. And the story doesn't end there, believe it or not. They told me they had an "above average" offer for me on the way out, but it turned out to be a mere 2 extra weeks of pay and benefits - and in exchange I had to sign a letter saying I wouldn't say anything negative about the company online. I was insulted and offended as this is total disrespect and an insult to my intelligence. Why would you assume I would sell my freedom of speech so cheaply? Naturally, I turned them down, and long story short they never gave me a much better offer so I refused to sign their NDA. And that's not the end of things either - this company loves dragging the misery out. During my EI application, I was told the ROE was filled out wrong. Unable to get in touch with the local HR rep via email or phone, I went to him in person. He told me they were in "year end" duties and they might not be able to deal with it until the end of the year (it was December by this time). It took them until mid-January to get back to me and let me know that my ROE was in fact filled out correctly. Why they couldn't just take 30 mins - if that - out of their day to confirm this in a timely manner I don't know, but to their credit they did step up to the plate and do it, if belatedly. Then a couple of weeks later I get a call from an EI processor in Newfoundland - the boss has been blowing off her calls. He won't even tell the EI processor why I left, so she asked me why and I gave her a rundown of it, at which point I was accepted for EI. Absolutely ridiculous.
