Vantaggi
NOTE: This entire review represents only the IT department, not the company as a whole. - Working environment with other teams was great, very social. - Company has flexibility for personal commitments. - Salary was okay. - Existing colleague who left for University was extremely skilled and luckily stayed on part time to effectively manage the Cisco networking.
Svantaggi
- IT Management had a tendency to not communicate effectively. - Responsibilities felt more in line with an administrative role, rather than IT systems administration or IT support. - IT Management was rude, unapproachable and did not provide the correct information on many occasions. - The IT infrastructure itself was a mess, no clearly defined policies, with a history of ill-practice, such as letting end users join computers to the domain named as "happy-bunney" or "coffee". No helpdesk was in place to effectively record tickets, so a mailbox was the only tool in place, which is itself a nightmare. When exposed to little amount of technical work, it was essentially a fire-fight to combat all errors made previously. - Personal grievance: The job was not as advertised in my particular case. Was advised on the day I started that half of the role involved supporting a HQ office of the parent company. This then became 5 days a week solely in the parent company HQ. This conflicted severely with personal commitments and added significantly to my commute time per week, around 6-7 hours. - Similarly I was expected to support the parent company, which was stupidly split into 2 domains, supported by teams in mainland Europe who were unapproachable and rude. Took 6 months for me to get the simple access on both domains to even change passwords/unlock accounts. - My role there was ill-defined, where they expected 24/7 support that I was not contractually obliged to provide. - Was advised before starting that there was opportunity for training, but this never arised. - History of poorly documented systems, with a "silo" mentality on technologies. I started 2 weeks before the other IT Support Engineer and we were bombarded with playing catch up on the lack of documentation. - IT Management were ineffective in their IT skills, simply did not know that much about Windows systems and the infrastructure. - The company itself lacked a HR department. - A history of poorly configured backups, using an old tape library that was simply ineffective for the requirements of the business. - Laptop builds are fairly frequent, but management insists on doing so from a USB stick with Windows 7 and all other software installations are done manually. This makes laptop builds very time consuming. I'm sure there's more, I just can't recall everything wrong with this team and position, because there is so much.