Mark Blythe

Avoid if you can Everything about this company is generally terrible - management, communication, promotions, pay (in a way), personal reviews, and professionalism. Management was not there to guide, encourage, promote, or listen to you. Management was there to make the customer happy which in the end meant taking no concern for their own workers. They'd sell you up the river for a penny. Communication was poor, to say the least. The most communication you'd get is a manager rifling off an email with the general idea/plan but absolutely no way of implementing it, no points of contacts, no standards, nothing. If you tried to ask questions about such plans, then more than likely you'd receive push-back from management or maybe even talked down to like you were an idiot. It was almost as-if management was told to send an email and they checked that box off. Anything that happened after the email was irrelevant because their only literal requirement was to send an email. This ranged from safety issues, to new requirements, to vacations (in fact, management had difficulty receiving and approving vacations so workers on site just ended up approving it ourselves at site and arranging backup, etc.). There were no promotions. Well, there were "promotions" but it was only time-based. There were no new standards and certainly no skill test to qualify you for the next level. The company was small so there were no position upgrades/promotions unless someone retired or died. The company also had a policy of hiring within first but routinely hired externally despite candidates matching their needs. They even posted an opening once for a new location and someone volunteered and they said that he had to pay for his own relocation "because he wanted to go and the company wasn't forcing him to go." Pay was good for non-degree holders but was seemingly lower than the customer we were serving and other vendors. Personal reviews were a joke. Of all the years I worked there my review was almost an exact Xerox copy of the previous year. Reviews were generally written by someone that never saw you work or worked alongside you. I questioned this and I was actually told that reviews didn't matter - that all reviews were eventually funneled to HR and HR decided who got what based on what everyone else was getting. In other words, any raise or lack or raise was not based on your individual work/merit - it was based on whatever HR thought was "fair" to everyone else. Professionalism was probably about as bad as it could get. Honestly, I can't think of how it could be worse unless they physically beat you. Management and HR routinely engaged in personal vendettas against people. If you raised a concern to them you'd be ignored at best and at worst ridiculed. The way to succeed in this company is to stay low, never ask questions, never raise concerns, never expect anything, never try to improve anything, and hope that you survive the layoffs. If you can do that then you have a very nice non-degree job.