Get ready to be overworked & underpaid while the things you use all day every day change randomly in ways that make them worse! The drive to sell out to Wall Street has been making the company progressively worse in little ways that all add up. The Sales team has been worked like dogs to add more and more customers but Support was not staffed up to match the increased demand--in fact there was a hiring freeze for a long time--leading to high stress, mass burnout, talented people quitting, long wait times for customers, angrier customers once they get to us, & increased churn. Now they finally are hiring again, but almost none of it is US-based, instead taking on cheap outsourced labor who create countless escalations and an insane ticket queue. Y'all know customers HATE that, right? You know they can tell when you stop hiring people who know what they're doing and can communicate effectively and instead start using some shady contractor that hires for a pulse and pays pennies? We've always been well-known and well-regarded for our outstanding tech support, and I am VERY proud to have been a contributor to that, but our customers are noticing the shift in quality. As I already noted some higher-up got the bright idea to start hiring late shift people in Australia instead of USA to save on shift differentials. No shade whatsoever to our coworkers Down Under, they're all great, I just think it's a shady business decision.
This same skinflint move of hiring cheap contractors has made trying to contact Engineering after normal US business hours an absolute nightmare. It feels like the only purpose those guys serve is to waste our time with nonsensical replies and then escalate to someone who knows what they're doing. Just hire people who know what they're doing from the start please! And if you need traction from someone in any other team you might as well go outside and watch the grass grow. Maybe they're chronically understaffed too?
Change is a constant in the tech industry, but WP Engine has been taking that adage a little too far. Our vital tools and systems keep getting changed out of the blue in ways that make them worse or even non-functional with zero input asked from us, and then we're ignored or shut down when we point out the inevitable issues those changes have caused. Almost daily there's some new process, product, or policy that changes our workflow (sometimes radically, usually for the worse) & documentation is rarely in place before the new thing is slated to go live. Sometimes documentation just never materializes at all which is pretty frustrating for both us & the customers when its' something we're expected to support. Sometimes the documentation exists but no one in Support has access to it.
(Note, I don't want to give you the impression that ALL the changes WP Engine has been making are bad, that's super not the case. Some changes are really great. It's just that when it comes to our tools & processes THOSE seem to just keep getting worse.)
Upward mobility WITHIN Support has gotten better over the years but we're really feeling the strain of years of not promoting new L2s at a rate higher than like 2/yr. Upward mobility OUT OF Support is extremely competitive & hard to attain esp. if they just hire an outsider for the position. It's typical to have to go through the full application & interview process up to 5 times or more before you make it out of this department.
I said the pay is ok but really that's only because I work really, really weird hours. And when I compare it to my previous job, adjusted for inflation I was making more money for less work with less tenure in 2017 in the same field & city.
On the topic of pay up until recently we got a $100 wellness bonus that we could get as a direct deposit to pay ourselves back for office & living expenses like medication, vet bills, cleaning supplies, gym memberships, almost anything you can buy legally, plus a $100 bonus on your workiversary. Now we're switching to a different thing where we get "points" that we can exchange for whatever random garbage is going to be in this 3rd party's "marketplace." No direct deposit option, no custom reimbursement, no bank transfer, just the "marketplace" of what will probably be mass-produced corporate logo junk OR we can lose 5% of the cash value by putting it on a prepaid debit card... which we will then have to pay ANOTHER fee to if we want to move that money into a bank. Oh and that 5% is taxed. I dunno, maybe I shouldn't prejudge it but I do not feel good about this. Considering we can't add our own money to get more "points" it feels like this is just another way to nickel & dime their way out of giving us money.
There are tons of fun events & important meetings that everyone is invited to but Support almost never gets to attend thanks to being chronically understaffed & availability-based.
Shift leads used to approve our breaks (if they ever got around to it) but now we're expected to handle 3 needy customers at once AND approve each other's breaks for some reason.
There's little to no standard of how far we're expected to go for a customer & some of them regularly make absolutely ludicrous requests. Not in practical terms anyway. Sometimes we're expected to say "oh sure yeah we'll do this extremely tedious thing for you that you could totally do yourself that'll take us 3 days to complete" & sometimes we get in trouble for agreeing to it instead.
Important to know if you're ever hospitalized or have surgery: not only is there no gap pay anymore but you ALSO can't go buy your own! So that means that if you're temporarily disabled you better have savings because you're about to lose 40% of your income while you're out of work. WP Engine used to provide this but it's just one more good thing/perk that was taken away.
Finally, another big con is the way L1s are pushed to use this stupid Gen AI bot some VP or middle manager got conned into buying. Like all Gen AI it's hot garbage. It almost never gives useful or correct results & it's giving those garbage results to techs who don't know any better & have no way of knowing they're being fed gibberish until they suddenly have a customer mad at them that they were told to click a button that's not there, because the AI copied instructions from some other company's website. So how are they supposed to know? Easy, the L2s are expected to check the answers of course! "Now wait a minute" you might say, "wouldn't it just be easier for them to ask an L2 to begin with?" And you'd be right, but someone spent money on this AI trash so this is what we're expected to do now! Love that for us.
As many complaints as I have I still really like working here & that's WHY it's so hard to watch all the good things I've loved about it get steadily chipped away. I know this company could be so much better because we WERE better. I just hope we can course correct before the stock market piggies force the company to fire everyone in my department & rehire nothing but cheap outsourced labor.
How's that been working out for Hostgator?
