First, some minor environmental complaints:
-The food sucked. bad. I realize its free, but you know they are justifying paying you so much less to feed you garbage as a perk. How on earth can you make all meat look grey, every single day? They were changing caterers when I left, so it may be better now. But even if it starts out decent, its usually cold before you get to your desk after waiting in a long line to get it. They have coolers with fresh-ish looking sandwiches/salads/snacks for sale, but they are way overpriced. The average prepackaged sandwich is $7-8.
-If you are without transportation (temporarily or long-term) be prepared for a long commute and nothing within walking distance. The only bus line within a mile only runs every 40 minutes at peak hours and even less so if off-peak. Aside from one quickie mart about a half mile away, there is absolutely nothing else (aside from other office buildings, warehouses, and apartments) within a mile of the office.
-Filthy, the whole place. When I first started working there and we were in the old building, I often saw at least two cleaning staff on the regular. When we moved to the new building, they only kept one person on for a building twice the size. When he left (I assume from burn-out) they replaced him with a lady who they apparently didn't even hire full-time. She was gung-ho when she was around, but I don't think I even saw her once in the last few months I was there. Our workspaces got a little better when they assigned desks, but that's only because we had our own spaces and didn't have to come in and find an empty desk that the last person left a mess.
-I get the need to relieve workplace tension and keep up morale, but nerf gun wars are only fun to the people that have nothing better to do. When they split up the office to give A Small Orange a section, they basically had nerf gun wars right next to you while you were on calls when they closed at 5pm. They also got rid of the in chair massages and replaced them with massages you have to pay for, while on your break. How is that even a replacement? If I am having to pay for a massage on my time off, I surely am not going to do it at the office.
Now, company wide complaints.......
-EIG is a huge corporation that clearly only cares about money. But I guess you could say that about all corporations are like that. They have this terrible habit of making huge changes in a reactive way vs. a proactive way. Call/chat wait time too long? Get rid of Internal Support and demand everything go to ticket. Want to make some changes to the training program? No new hires for six months while we work that out. Oh wow, why don't we have any employees? Hire a bunch of temps to answer calls, making calling into support the equivelent of going to your dog walker to get a root canal. Whats this? Now initial ticket response time is 2+weeks? No more tickets, L1s can't create them, L2s need supervisor approval (in which there are none ever available). Create a new tiered system where depending on what options the customer chooses to direct their call, they can get a different queue where the speak to someone specially trained and given access to resolve the issue. That sounds great, only you forgot to separate the queues by dept and now the vast majority of incoming contact eventually end up in L2, and you don't that many L2s. Call/chat wait times skyrocket again.............
-Over time, many services that the company offered have been replaced with sub-par 3rd party support for a price. We still treat them as our own services in regards to who you pay for it, but when these services need support we send them to the 3rd party. EIG is very keen on getting you to upsell these services instead of trying to solve the issue, and they actually now own all of these services under their umbrella. There is usually very little training (if any) on how these services work, we aren't supposed to support them, but they login to them via our billing system.
-The billing system is so nighmareish its comical. You know, if you are the kind of person who laughs when everything has gone to hell. Bugs have been there for so long we now call them features. Services that get paid for don't renew, or services that have long been cancelled get double charged a year down the line. Domains expire and go into redemption even tho they were paid on time.
-Make sure to become best buds with your supervisor. Your work alone will not get you anywhere promotion or raise-wise. They can promote the most useless employees and leave some of their best workers in the cold. Obviously, not all supes are petty or play favorites, but there are enough of them there that are for it to be noted.
-PTO/flex time policies seem to change drastically every year or 2. When I left it seemed fair, but I have been told by employees I stay in touch with that they cut the amount of accrued PTO allowed to use as flex time in half with no notice at the new year.
I toggled back and forth between recommend and don't recommend to a friend. If you need a job and way to get your foot into the door industry-wise, Its a good start. Just know that its very unlikely any of your long-term goals will be realized here or at any other EIG company
