Good company - Recensione dipendente - Trainee Engineer presso UltraServe

Fast Paced and Fun, Energetic and Accountable Culture

Growing Fast which is fun but can be a bit chaotic at times.

- People: The folks I worked with were excellent, some were definitely top-of-class in certain fields and invaluable resources - I've made lifelong friends both professionally and personally - Learning: I've broadened my horizons significantly through working here, but I'm not sure how much of this is owed to my own initiative over the organization's

- Management: The service team of the business had a prolifically terrible management resource for several years, which drove employees from the business. Largely this happens, but the resource was responsible for the global team across three locations, did not perform his job and regularly levied verbal abuse towards team members. We lost at least 4 people solely due to this management resource and ultimately caused the mass exodus of our US regional service team. The management resource in question was only removed from the business after several years due to higher management realizing that myself and others had been performing large portions of his job. - Pay: UltraServe relocated me to the Chicago office on the back of our American team being decimated by above poor management. I got a minor bump in pay but later found that the business had wrongfully declared me as an L1 resource to the Department of Labor to avoid paying me what they were legally obligated. The prevailing wage as declared by the Department of Labor was at least double my salary at the time. - People: The business really did employ all types, including one resource designated as team leadership in Australia which buried all semblance of a positive work environment. Management largely gave this employee free rein to be as detrimental as desired on an interpersonal level, as they deemed them to be a hard worker - they were essentially granted immunity from punitive actions. In the few years the Australian service team had to stomach this coworker, the staff member in question: - Regularly tattled on other members being late back from lunch - largely this was often only by minutes, and staff member in question would sometimes disappear for hours on lunch. - Timed bathroom breaks of other staff to report them to higher-ups in an effort to generate write-ups. - Attempted to sabotage promotions of other staff by seeding negativity and false data to management -- I myself was bitten by this when I returned to work from hospitalization from a lung puncture, only to find out the generated rumor that management received regarding my hospital visit was substance abuse. - Intentionally withheld information from UK and US based regional service departments so that the Australian service department would look better by comparison - Including information relevant to maintaining customer-signed SLAs which caused our regional teams great pain and prevented the regional teams from being autonomous in support. - Obsessively micromanaged outside of hours, purely for the purpose of generating demerits and/or writeups. Often the staff member was spied being online during the early hours of the morning and after midnight, commenting on work being performed by member of our regional US and UK based service departments - seemingly for the sole goal of highlighting detractions in work, and deficiencies in other engineers. - Routinely made nasty comments about coworkers, sometimes branching into hate speech at the detraction of darker skinned team members and once towards a trans member of our regional service team. - Hours: As the business hemorrhaged staff, covering hours became a large issue and the staff members I worked with in the service department were regularly working 6-7 days a week and in excess of 60-70 hours on most weeks. - Education: My expenses for taking exams were consistently fought, and largely denied towards the end of my tenure in the company as I continued my path of becoming AWS certified. The agreement made with management on hire was that I was to be given several hours on a weekly basis to study towards my next AWS certificate and that the organization would pay for the first two attempts on each certification. - Benefits: The US branch of the business does not have an HR department, but instead outsources HR to a company called Trinet. The benefits offered are poor at best and costly. Trinet somehow makes mistakes on my W2 certificate every single year, causing me cost and time expenses when performing my tax return. Lastly, since exiting the organization and relaying to my former coworkers that I've been doing well and am now being paid a fair working wage, enjoying comprehensive benefits and all-round finding more time to enjoy my life - I've come to find out that management has painted me as a defector, stating that I've used the company for my own gain and that I wouldn't be successful outside of the organization due to numerous erroneous reasons. I worry for remaining team members that they're being gaslit into an untenable future.