This may take a while...
1. The pay was terrible. After 2 promotions and 3 raises, I was making $17.50/hour and working tons of overtime. My position should have been $20+/hour minimum. Apparently a month after I left, the wages were raised, but it's still not very impressive.
2. The OT (overtime) will KILL you. In the interview for my first position, I was asked if I was okay working a little overtime in the summer when it got busy. Sure, yeah, no problem. I was NOT TOLD that they meant they would order 10 hours of overtime between Saturday and Monday, MANDATORY. Before this job, I didn't even know mandatory OT was legal. If you cannot complete the OT call, it shows up on your record and affects your 6- or 12-month review raise. Speaking of which...
3. The raises are crap. The maximum you can get at a time is 5%. That, my dears, is a standard of living raise that everyone should get regardless, especially living in this area of affluence. Also, raises were incredibly subjective. An employee that was absolute garbage and phoned it in each and every day could often get the same 5% raise that someone like me (remember, 2 promotions within a year) would get. The raise always depends on who the manager was. Speaking of managers...
4. Boy is there a massive disconnect between the higher ups and the line level employees. I've been putting off writing this review in order to cool off but apparently I'm still steamed. Multiple departments had new products launched which effectively doubled or tripled their workload. This happened during a time in which we couldn't hire new employees AND since all departments were strapped, we couldn't even lend or borrow staff members since, like I said, ALL departments were overloaded. Of course, the reactions of management was to order a MINIMUM of 10 hours of overtime per WEEK per EMPLOYEE and, I quote "until we say it's over". Hi, I'm sorry, but I didn't know we signed up for 50+ hour weeks all summer because of bad management. Oh, and it should go without saying that if there were any times we couldn't get the job done or keep up with volume, yes, we were blamed.
Needless to say, I was fed up and simply left. I respected my direct supervisor too much to just quit and leave on the same day so I gave her a 3-week notice. Mind you, I had tried to negotiate a higher salary for months before-hand in order to give them a chance to keep one of their best employees (did I mention I was the trainer for our team? And did I mention that half our team quit before I did? Hm.), but they were too wrapped up in bureaucracy to increase my hourly even a few pennies. Thanks guys, way to make an incredibly dedicated employee feel utterly devalued.
OVER WORKED
UNDER PAID
That was the mantra of the time.
