Vantaggi
Decent pay Quarterly bonuses depending on metrics $500 tool allowance Able to make your own schedule within reason Laid back coworkers who are always willing to help Pretty good work / life balance. If you’re willing to work overtime and on weekends to get caught up or help other techs, there’s good money to be made. Company van with gas card. It’s awesome not having to put wear and tear on your own vehicle.
Svantaggi
Unpredictable days, sometimes you end up driving 3 hours to a customer just to have to order parts or to turn a screw, then 3 hours back. Get to hear about productive recovery vs. total recovery, many times there’s nothing you can do about it, you end up not needed at a customer site or you have to attend meetings which are billed out to the company. Horrible office support / dispatchers. Dispatchers think every job is a 15 minute job and is 20 minutes away from you. They think 2 person jobs like standing up / laying down trucks or changing out 200lb drive units is a one person job. Some get snippy if you tell them otherwise. Some act like you should be working until 7 PM and will send you out to far service calls at 2:30 in the afternoon (operational hours are normally 7:30 AM - 4:30 PM). Some locations have dispatchers who are located far away from the area you serve, and the dispatcher isn’t familiar with the area so work isn’t divided up based on who is closest. Required to be on-call a few times a year, but you get an extra $250 bonus for every call you go out on. Sometimes you’re required to go out in then middle of the night only to find the customer location is closed until morning. Corporate Raymond Field Service is just about useless, that’s if they get back to you at all. A lot of the designs of the trucks make no sense or require a ton of work to seemingly do a simple task, this is more of a Raymond design problem not so much Pengate. You often end up working on equipment that you’ve never had training on or even manuals / diagrams for. This means more time diagnosing / researching / repairing / finding parts, leading to bloated customer bills. Learn how to tell customers no. The individuals that determine what parts you have on your van spend too much time looking at spreadsheets instead of talking to techs about what they realistically use. I’ve got parts on my van that I haven’t touched in 2+ years just taking up space.